Category: Jason Sudeikis

Ted Lasso’s third season ended in May 2023. I loved the first two seasons but I absolutely loathed the third season. It felt like Jason Sudeikis’s personal situation affected every part of the show, from the writing to the decisions about all of the characters to the way everything “wrapped up.” It was no secret that Jason was basically the only one who wanted the show to end, the rest of the actors and writers would have loved to keep going. There were rumors about a spinoff starring Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca and there were other rumors that AppleTV basically went to Jason and said “name your price, we want more Lasso.” Well, now that everyone is more than a year removed from the Lasso finale, they’re deciding to do a “fourth season.” Hmm.

Ted Lasso fans, this is not a drill. In a major step toward the long-awaited fourth season of Apple TV ’s hugely popular soccer comedy, the series’ studio Warner Bros. Television has picked up the options on the three original cast members who had been contracted under the aegis of the UK acting union Equity, sources tell Deadline. They are Hannah Waddingham, who plays AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Walton, Brett Goldstein, who plays hardman Roy Kent and Jeremy Swift, who plays Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins.

After securing the trio, the studio is expected to start reaching out to Ted Lasso cast members with SAG-AFTRA contracts whose options had expired, so they will need to make new deals, we hear. In addition to co-creators/executive producers Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) and Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard), that is believed to include Juno Temple (Keeley Jones). We hear one of the Ted Lasso OGs, Phil Dunster (Jamie Tart), has not been picked up, presumably due to a conflict with another series; he is on both Prime Video’s The Devil’s Hour and Apple’s Surface.

It is unclear which other stars may be approached about Season 4; the cast have all said repeatedly that they would be happy to reprise their roles if an opportunity arises. Many would likely pop in for guest appearances.

Getting the cast back paves the way toward a Season 4 greenlight, contingent on budget approval and scheduling as actors whose options have lapsed may have joined other series that have them in first position, sources said.

Starting the process for a Season 4 greenlight indicates that the main Ted Lasso driving force on and off-screen, Sudeikis, is on board for a new installment as the studio would not have proceeded without his consent. The fate of Ted Lasso has always hinged on Sudeikis, who’d originated the character in NBC Sports videos. While being open that they would love to extend Ted Lasso, one of the biggest and most acclaimed comedies of the past decade, Apple and Warner Bros. executives have made it clear that it would be up to Sudeikis whether the show would continue.

[From Deadline]

In the dreamlike final sequence where we saw what happens to the characters, it felt like they were setting up a post-Ted Lasso series in Richmond. That was what most of the conversations were about last year, all of the potential spinoffs now that the Ted character is back in Kansas. I wonder how they’ll explain Lasso’s potential return to Richmond? Suddenly his kid doesn’t need him anymore? His ex-wife is still banging their marriage counselor? Rebecca and Roy can’t manage the football club without him and they beg him to return? Or will Ted see the light and come to the conclusion that, actually, Richmond is his home and he needs to go home? This is why I would tune in, to see how they resolve Ted’s return to Richmond and what “happened” to everyone in the two years Ted was back in Kansas. I also wonder what happened with Sudeikis – he was so burned out on Lasso and he was phoning in his performance in the third season. Maybe he just needed a real break and now he’s ready to come back.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images, Backgrid, AppleTV .

SPOILERS for the final season of Ted Lasso.

I didn’t write anything about Ted Lasso’s finale yesterday because I only watched the final episode late in the day on Wednesday. I have to admit, the third season was not “must watch” for me at all, and there were several weeks where I delayed watching the latest episode until the weekend. While there were some good parts of Season 3, I hope even diehard fans can be honest and recognize that this final season was a bloated mess of half-finished and forgotten stories, weirdly uneven storytelling and Jason Sudeikis completely sleepwalking through his performance.

That is something that will stick with me, and I hate that it will stick with me – Jason Sudeikis was absolutely f–king miserable in Season 3, and his misery affected every part of the show. It was shocking to watch “Ted Lasso” disassociate with everyone (especially Rebecca!!) as they were sobbing and telling him how much they’ll miss him. There were also so many parts of these really significant plotlines which just… happened off-camera. We never saw Nate make the decision to quit working for Rupert and handing in his resignation. We never saw Lasso tell Rebecca and the team that he was leaving. We never even saw Colin *actually* come out and tell his teammates that he’s gay. The choices were so f–king weird.

As it’s been said, I understand that Sudeikis was going through a lot of sh-t in his personal life with Olivia Wilde and the custody fight for their kids. That drama was peppered into so much of the third season in really obvious ways as Sudeikis “worked out” his feelings through Lasso and his ex-wife. Then at the end, Lasso goes home to Kansas and actually returns to the home he shared with Michelle and their son? Are we supposed to believe that they got back together? The final shot of Lasso breaking the fourth wall as his coaches his son’s soccer team was also just… like, he didn’t look happy. He looked like a man trying to get through the day as he has a nervous breakdown.

Do you think they’ve set it up for the spinoff? The Richmond Way? With Beard and Roy Kent and basically all of the cast except for Sudeikis? Maybe.

Photos courtesy of AppleTV, Avalon Red, Backgrid.

SPOILERS for this season of Ted Lasso.

It’s felt like a dirty secret, something no one wants to admit over the past month: the third and final season of Ted Lasso is bad. I enjoyed the first two seasons, and even applauded some of the more unconventional storylines, because I believed in the show and I believed that Jason Sudeikis knew where he was going. But this third season has left me questioning if Sudeikis and the other writers have any f–king idea how they’re going to end this show. The Atlantic’s David Sims feels the same way. Sims wrote a piece called “Ted Lasso Has Lost Its Way,” and I just wanted to do a few highlights from the piece:

Midway through watching “Sunflowers,” a nearly feature-length episode of Ted Lasso that juggles five separate plotlines, I wondered aloud, “When exactly did this show turn into a prestige drama?” Yes, the script still has plenty of jokes—though few of them deserve more than a low chuckle, and many characters are little more than caricatures. But as it’s continued to draw viewers and accolades for Apple TV , this Emmy-winning comedy has pivoted further and further away from the genre to which it supposedly belongs, devolving into ham-fisted, novelistic nonsense.

…Ted Lasso’s first season earned its massive hype; it was a well-crafted workplace sitcom that built out its central character’s leadership strengths step by step, methodically depicting how Ted’s emotional intelligence more than makes up for his lack of tactical acumen. The show’s propensity for “niceness” was radical and surprising, somehow allowing it to generate laughs while dodging conflict.

Season 3, which debuted on Apple TV in March and is rounding into what may or may not be a series finale, is a pure example of the excesses that can flourish on streaming television. The show has no time slot to worry about, and none of the formal or thematic constraints of network television. Perhaps that’s why its episodes have settled into such supersize lengths, with “Sunflowers” running an ungodly 63 minutes. Its storytelling feels similarly slack, with characters taking whole seasons to have the slimmest emotional realizations.

Now, in Season 3, these supplementary characters have all become the stars of their own shows. Ted Lasso is no longer a workplace sitcom but a universe of workplace sitcoms, drifting from a football club to an upstart PR firm to another (more evil) football club to a pair of local restaurants. Scenes are devoid of jokes and filled with dopey, self-important monologuing on the issues of the day. Rather than have any conflict, characters offer endless hugs and wan smiles, all under the watchful mustache of Mr. Lasso, whose retinue of dad jokes feels noticeably phoned in.

[From The Atlantic]

I agree – and while I don’t mind the longer episodes, it feels like the show is just doing these longer episodes because they’ve stupidly split up all of the characters and feel the need to give everyone their own “moments” and storylines. Which would be fine if those storylines felt organic and there was some kind of masterful story being told. Instead, we get Keeley off in her own universe, suddenly having a relationship with a rich, judgemental, love-bombing a–hole. We get Roy and those red strings. We get Jason Sudeikis working out his Olivia Wilde mess on-screen.

In the first two seasons, you could also depend on Coach Lasso’s baseline managerial competence too, only that’s gone away now. Like, I get the criticism of “Lasso is actually a terrible football coach,” but in the first two seasons, he proved himself to be an inspired and intuitive manager, the kind of person who understands what people need and how an organization (or team) should operate. The “slump” of the team seemed to be the characterization of the real-world slump of the writers’ room.

Joanna Robinson mentioned something on Twitter this week, a rumor she heard that “they threw out 2/3 of the season and had to shoot it over again (it was supposed to come out last fall) which would explain things like Rupert and Zava fully disappearing from the plot. But it would not explain why the second pass is this messy.” Extensive reshoots and tossed scripts would explain some of this. But I’m also not convinced that Sudeikis knows how to land this plane.

Photos courtesy of Instagram/AppleTV, Backgrid and Avalon Red.

It’s really hard to stomach the fact that this spring will bring us the end of two wildly popular TV series, Succession and Ted Lasso. The two shows are premiering their final seasons this month, with Succession’s ten-episode fourth season and Lasso’s twelve-episode third season. It’s just so sad because… well, there are so many stories left to tell within these worlds! I love the Ted Lasso universe, it’s so wholesome and nice. But Jason Sudeikis – the creator/star – tells Deadline that the third season is 100% the final season of Lasso, although he leaves room for a possible spinoff:

Jason Sudeikis is not ready to say his Apple TV hit Ted Lasso is ending after season 3, but he does suggest that the upcoming episodes seem to wrap up his Emmy-winning comedy quite nicely.

“I mean, there’s always Cameo, right?” Sudeikis tells Deadline how he could return as Ted one day, via the website that lets you request personalized videos from your favorite actors. “This is the end of this story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell, that we loved to tell. The fact that folks will want more and are curious beyond more than what they don’t even know yet—that being Season 3—it’s flattering. Maybe by May 31, once all 12 episodes of the season [have been released], they’re like, ‘Man, you know what, we get it, we’re fine. We don’t need anymore, we got it.’ But until that time comes, I will appreciate the curiosity beyond what we’ve come up with so far.”

There have been talks as to whether the comedy could be spun off into a new iteration. (We vote for The World According to Keeley Jones). Sudeikis, who developed Ted Lasso with Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly, seems open to the idea.

“Yeah, I think that we’ve set the table for all sorts of folks…to get to watch the further telling of these stories,” he said. “Again, I can’t help but take the question as flattery for what all of us that were working on the show has tried to do. It’s really kind of folks to even consider that because you never know what’s gonna happen when you make things. The fact that people want more, even if it’s a different avenue is lovely.”

[From Deadline]

Considering the popularity of Roy Kent and Keeley Jones, I do think they would be the natural spinoff characters. Brett Goldstein – who plays Roy Kent – is a writer on Lasso too, so it would feel like the next step for Goldstein to just shift the story more towards “what does Roy Kent do after Ted Lasso goes back to America?” I mean, I’m assuming that’s how the story ends? And Goldstein has also spoken at length about how much he loves Roy Kent and wants to play him forever.

The full-length trailer for the third season was released last week. Lots of Nate!

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, AppleTV.