‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4 premiere review: Jason Sudeikis returns for a comforting homecoming in need of fresh legs

Three years after the final whistle, ‘Ted Lasso’ is back on the pitch, and while the old playbook still works, the Lady Greyhounds could use a few new plays

Published - August 10, 2026 06:12 pm IST

A still from ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4 | Photo Credit: Apple TV

There is something immediately comforting about seeing Ted Lasso again. Three years after the third season seemed to close the book, Jason Sudeikis’s moustachioed optimist has slipped back into that beloved Midwestern geniality that made him one of the most endearing characters in modern TV comedy.

The revival begins by confronting the question of why Ted would even return to Richmond after making such a definitive choice to go home. He has spent the intervening years in Kansas City, working at a supermarket while remaining closely involved with his son Henry. The club’s imperiously maternal CEO and owner, Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), the PR executive turned marketing boss Keeley (Juno Temple), and the softly spoken operations man Higgins (Jeremy Swift) eventually arrive with an offer to coach Richmond’s new women’s team, and after the requisite hesitation, Ted asks Henry and his mother Michelle to move to England with him. The directness of that decision exists because the series simply needs Ted back, but its logic is consequently thin, especially after Season 3 considered his decision to leave as the mature culmination of his story.

Once back in London, though, the Richmond machinery starts humming again. Ted applies his tried-and-tested therapeutic optimism to a second-division women’s team facing financial limitations and cultural prejudice, while the series folds in generous doses of its established appetite for random pop-cultural quotation. The jokes are pleasant, and the football remains photographed with the clean, buoyant energy that has always made Richmond feel like a particularly well-funded television fantasy. Watching these familiar faces occupy the same spaces again has an undeniable warmth. The show knows how much affection its audience has accumulated for them, and it handles that affection with care.

The women’s team gives Ted Lasso its most promising new material because the problems facing the Lady Greyhounds possess a physical reality that Ted’s old parabolic vocabulary cannot simply talk away. The club has fewer resources, women’s football receives less institutional attention, and players have to negotiate practical pressures involving childcare, pregnancy, injury and access to facilities. The premise creates an opportunity for the series to let its characters confront structures that cannot be fixed through a whiteboard exercise.

The first five episodes only partly seize that opportunity. Sex Educationbreakout Tanya Reynolds is the strongest addition as Alice Chilton, a former player and assistant coach whose clipped hostility gives the coaching staff an actual source of friction. Reynolds plays Alice with a wonderfully economical physicality, keeping her face rigid while Ted attempts to invade her emotional perimeter with the same persistence he once applied to Roy Kent and Nate. Her resentment also has a legitimate institutional basis: she was overlooked for the head coaching position, and Rebecca admits that she was never seriously considered. That exchange gives Alice something sharper than the usual Ted Lasso woundedness. She has a grievance with a material cause.

A still from ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4 | Photo Credit: Apple TV

The players have received thinner treatment so far. Andor and Adolescence star Faye Marsay’s character is introduced largely through motherhood, while the rest of the squad register through reductive shorthand: sisters, a couple, a law student, and a slightly off-kilter goalkeeper, Boots (Jude Mack), who remains my favourite of the new players so far. The original Richmond ensemble took time to acquire individual textures through locker-room rivalries and accumulated interaction. But the new team has barely been given enough dramatic value to become a team before the returning cast starts reclaiming it.

That overcrowding also exposes the revival’s central problem. Roy and Keeley remain trapped in their frustrating romantic holding pattern, despite the mileage that the relationship has already extracted from the audience. Brendan Hunt’s Coach Beard remains integrated in weird, almost grating ways despite the new women’s team focus. Rebecca and Keeley continue to receive substantial space because their friendship remains one of the show’s most reliable emotional mechanisms. These characters are played with the same confidence as ever, yet inertia has started to set in.