For three seasons the word “BELIEVE”, on a crooked yellow sign became one of television’s most recognisable messages. Thanks to Ted Lasso millions of us did exactly that. We believed in AFC Richmond, and in Ted, which was sometimes hard to do, but more specifically, we believed that kindness could actually win. Then the show ended, Ted went home with victory in hand.
Three years later, Ted Lasso is back for Season 4 and judging by the numbers, we didn’t just believe. We seriously missed the guy. According to Variety, the fourth season pulled in a staggering 296.6 million minutes of viewing in the United States during its first two days on Apple TV. That makes it the biggest launch in the streamer’s history. Bloody brilliant, for a show that essentially said goodbye three years ago, would’t you say?
But those numbers got me thinking about what drew us back. Did we come back because we missed Ted Lasso or because we missed how it made us feel? I for one think that bringing back something that people loved with a different angle can be risky. Season 3 gave Ted a great ending. He returned home to his son, AFC Richmond had completed an incredible journey and the characters we’d spent years getting to know appeared ready to move forward with their lives. A picture perfect ending.
But Season 4 has decided to reopen that door. This time Ted returns to Richmond to coach the club’s women’s team, the Lady Greyhounds. Rebecca, Keeley, Higgins, Roy Kent and Coach Beard remain part of the story, but things have definitely changed. The men’s team that dominated the first three seasons is no longer the centre of everything, and several familiar faces have moved on. That’s quite a gamble. You can’t simply change the players, put Ted back on the sidelines and expect lightning to strike twice. The original series worked mainly because the chemistry between the characters was so interesting. Roy and Jamie, Ted and Rebecca, Keeley and Rebecca, Ted and Beard, and even Nate’s complicated journey became an important part of what made Richmond feel like more than just a fictional football club.
So what are people saying about Ted Lasso Season 4? Well… it depends entirely on who you ask. The critics haven’t exactly been unanimous in welcoming Ted back with open arms. The first question to field is simply whether the series needed another season at all. I mean, Season 3 wrapped things up in such a perfect way, so one has to wonder why this was necessary. There are also those that feel the new episodes are working double time to recreate the optimism and emotional warmth that had previously come so naturally.
The problem with recreating something special is that eventually you become aware that you’re trying to recreate something special. But audiences appear considerably happier to have Ted back. Early viewer reactions praised the return of Rebecca, Keeley, Roy and Beard and showed a keen interest in the possibilities that come with introducing an entirely new group of players. Even some viewers who weren’t completely sold on the premiere responded more positively to the episodes that followed, saying the familiar humour, friendships and emotional moments are beginning to find their rhythm again. Which is what Season 4 needs more than anything.
Because underneath all the football, biscuits, motivational speeches and Roy Kent’s wonderfully colourful vocabulary, Ted Lasso was always about people. I think “ BELIEVE” was Ted’ way of dealing with divorce, loneliness, anxiety and panic attacks. But he wasn’t alone because, Rebecca was trying to rebuild herself after a destructive marriage. Roy was figuring out who he was once football could no longer define him. Jamie had to learn that being talented didn’t give him permission to be a complete pain in everyone’s backside. “BELIEVE” applied to all these characters who were broken in different ways. And somehow they helped fix one another.
When the show first arrived in 2020, the world was quite frankly a mess. We were locked inside our homes, people were scared and nobody really knew what tomorrow was going to look like.. and it’s for this reason that Ted Lasso connected with so many people. It never really tried to convince us that life was wonderful all the time. It simply suggested that when life isn’t wonderful, having decent people around you can make it slightly easier to survive. Football was almost secondary. Which is also why changing the team doesn’t necessarily have to destroy what made the series work.
If Season 4 can find that same humanity inside the Lady Greyhounds, then perhaps there’s another story worth telling here. The challenge will be allowing those new characters to become people we genuinely care about rather than replacements for characters we already miss, bringing on the nostalgia. You see, nostalgia is a powerful element. It has a way of convincing us that everything was better before. The music and movies were better and to some degree, even sweets somehow tasted better when we were children.
So when a beloved television series returns after several years, we’re not just judging what we’re watching now. We’re comparing it with the memories we’ve spent years polishing in our heads, which is an impossible standard to uphold. And Ted Lasso Season 4 isn’t only competing against every other show currently streaming. It’s competing against the version of Ted Lasso we remember. Those enormous opening numbers tell us that people were willing to come back. Nearly 300 million minutes in two days is a pretty convincing indication that audiences haven’t forgotten AFC Richmond.But viewing figures can tell us who showed up.
What they can’t do is tell us whether they’ll stay. I personally think it’s far too early to decide whether Ted Lasso has lost the magic that made it special. It’s a new chapter with a different team, different relationships and inevitably a different dynamic. Expecting it to feel exactly like Season 1 would probably defeat the entire purpose of bringing it back. Maybe the better question isn’t whether Season 4 feels the same. Maybe it’s whether it can make us care again. Because somewhere underneath all those record-breaking numbers sits the reason millions of people pressed play in the first place.
We believed.
Perhaps Season 4 simply needs to convince us to do it one more time.
