Ted Lasso Seasons 2 and 3 - It Was That Dream I Had...

Last night I watched the final episode of Ted Lasso Season 3. It sure as hell felt like an ending. But it wasn't. Season 4 is currently in production. It's due to air sometime in 2026 with the smart money on a spot in the summer schedule.

I already knew that, even as I was watching, although I only found out earlier the same day. Often, the first thing I do when I get to the end of what appears to be the final season of a show is to google to see if that's really what it is or if there's more to come. This time, though, I just happened, by co-incidence, to have seen a news story about the fourth season before I watched the finale.

It's spoilers all the way down from here, by the way, just in case anyone's not seen it yet and plans to. 

The knowledge another season was coming certainly put an odd spin on the whole thing. I've rarely seen a concluding episode that looked more like the writers putting the final dots over the "i"s and making sure every last "t" was properly crossed. It did everything short of putting up a post-credits "Where are they now" roll-call, although the last few minutes were pretty much a montage version of exactly that.

Except for one thing. 

Coach Beard (Or, as we now know him, "Willis".) has faked appendicitis to get off the plane even after the doors have been locked. Ted's still on the plane, alone now, heading back to Kansas to be near his son, having resigned from his managerial job with Richmond AFC and said his goodbyes to everyone 

There follows a cavalcade of scenes, apparently set at some unspecified time in the future, probably months rather than years, in which we see all kinds of things happening. Roy Kent is appointed Ted's replacement as manager. Rebecca sells 49% of the club to "the fans" and stays on as owner. Keeley proposes Richmond start a women's team and Rebecca agrees. Coach Beard marries Jane in what looks very much like a pagan ceremony at Stonehenge...

Most surprisingly of all, Sam appears somehow to have made it into the Nigerian national side. I found this by far the hardest to swallow. The billionaire psychopath who swore it would never happen must have been killed in a plane crash or something.

I was watching all of this in the full knowledge that whatever it looked like, it wasn't actually the and of the story, when the montage ended and we cut to a shot showing Ted in the plane, waking up from a nap. That moved into a sequence where he arrives back home in Kansas, which was clearly out of sync with the future timeline we've just been watching, back instead in linear continuity with the rest of the episode.

My immediate thought was "Oh, it was all Ted's dream!". It certainly seemed like something he would have dreamed because it was all so nice. Everyone got what they wanted, pretty much. No-one seemed to have any regrets. No-one was sad. Certainly no-one seemed to miss Ted.

Except, when I went to take a look at what's known so far about Season 4, it does kind of fit in with the montage. No-one's saying anything about Coach Beard marrying Jane but apparently the whole thrust of the show is going to be a new women's team at the club, which Ted will return to manage. And Roy Kent is back in a major role (Not all the cast are coming back, apparently, and of those who do, some will only be making cameos or guest appearances.) which certainly sounds like he could be managing the men's team.

So, was it a dream sequence or not? Let me ask google. 

Well, that was certainly a very popular interpretation. And frankly, I find it hard to believe the creators didn't expect the montage to be received that way. I mean, why the hell else would you cut straight to a shot of Ted waking up the moment the sequence finished if you didn't want to suggest it was all a dream?

But apparently it wasn't a dream at all. Or so the director claims. Assuming you can make sense of his peculiar syntax. Here's what Screen Rant reports him as saying, in reply to a direct question about it:

"... I think the details are too specific for it to be a dream of tense. I know there's something very dreamlike about the first scene which is Rebecca seeing her Airline captain and he's not behind him and he's like is this really not and then after the Montage Ted wakes up, but I think we're flashing forward to seeing what happens to everybody in the future."

"A dream of tense."? "...he's not behind him and he's like is this really not..."? I have no idea what that means. Also, wouldn't the director know? Why is he speculating?

Anyway, all of that oddness did somewhat take away from the overall impression left by Season 3, which otherwise was that it was a satisfying, very enjoyable, frequently funny watch, well up to the exemplary standards of Season 1. 

Season 2 was a lot more up and down, I thought, with the Christmas episode being especially weak. Granted, seasonal one-offs are rarely the highlight of any show but the Ted Lasso Christmas Special, which it might as well have been called, was very unconvincing in early Autumn and I suspect wouldn't have gone down much better in December.

Things did improve a lot after that. Season 2 sagged in the middle but rose again and ended on a level noticeably well above where it had begun. Season 3 picked up from there and continued to ascend. There were plenty of moments to remember, not least tour de force soliloquies from both Roy Kent and Rebecca and the whole of the excellent Fear And Loathing In Amsterdam episode. (Not the real name, sadly.)

Ted Lasso, despite being named for a single character, is very much an ensemble piece, with a huge cast of regular characters, something that becomes more and more obvious the longer the show goes on. Indeed, in Season 3, Ted doesn't really do all that much or have all that many significant storylines. In keeping with his managerial style, he mostly encourages others to shine.

My favorites remain Roy and Keeley, both of whom undergo significant character development throughout the run, although I worry that humanizing Roy any further may somewhat reduce the hilarious impact of his anger, glares and voluminous swearing. Keeley also seemed perhaps to have received a little too much attention from the writers by the end. I'm not sure we needed every twist in her story delivered in such quick succession.

Of the minor characters, Rebecca's mother was always a delight and Nate's girlfriend, Jade, has some of the best deadpan expressions I've seen in a while. Barbara was fun, too. but it's unfair, really, to single out anyone from the supporting cast. They're uniformly excellent.

I wish I could say the same for the numerous cameos from real people playing themselves. The ones I recognized were frequently wooden and awkward, with Gary Lineker and Thierry Henri among the exceptions, but my real problem with the endless walk-ons was that frequently I was aware I was supposed to recognize someone but I had no clue who I was looking at.

The vote for Character Most Likely To Get Their Own Spin-Off has to go to Coach Beard, who frequently seemed to be in a different show to everyone else already. The drip-feed of detail about his past became more and more surreal as the episodes went by and yet somehow none of it ever seemed entirely unbelievable. 

Nate, on the other hand, certainly wins the prize for strongest character arc with his largely convincing redemption storyline. By the end of the first season I really couldn't stand him and I still think we should have been given a little more insight, back then, into the reasons for his self-doubt, as opposed to some of the scenes of open aggression and self-justification we got instead. 

Over the course of the next two seasons, though, enough of his backstory and internal monologue was revealed to allow me to accept his contrition as genuine. And thank god he finally stopped spitting. That was stomach-turning to watch. Hmm. Now I come to think of it, it was from the moment Keeley and Rebecca taught him that assertiveness technique that his personality changed for the worse and it changed for the better as soon as he abandoned it...

As for the actual sporting scenes, I thought the training sessions got more farcical just as the games became more credible. Certainly the matches were better-shot in the latter episodes, with the editing occasionally even making it look as though some of the actors were playing football. 

The way the results fell out was very satisfying, I thought, with a great balance being struck between the standard sports-fiction no-hopers to champions arc and a more believable tale of good performances and bad luck. Mediocre sports teams do sometimes have exceptional seasons after all.

With Manchester City pipping Richmond to the Premier League title and Ted thereby not quite having achieved his goal and with the team qualifying for the Champions League through coming second, it did seem like there were a couple of strong pegs on which to hang that fourth season. Then the montage arrived and it absolutely felt like every last loose end was being tied in a neat bow. Had I not already known,  another season was coming, I would have been sure that was all.

And now it seems the whole thing is going to shift direction again, which is probably a sound creative decision but may not feel as satisfying as more of the same might have done. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. And believe. 

My replacement for Ted Lasso is going to be the Rashida Jones vehicle, Sunny. Cancelled after just one season I believe but I said I wasn't going to let that put me off any more. I know nothing about it other than the trailer. It looks nuts and I'm not surprised it didn't find an audience but it has some great reviews and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%. It's ten episodes so I'll let you know what I think in a couple of weeks.

Beginnings And Endings

Since I started using AI to make music, earlier in the year, my TV viewing, like my gaming, has taken a nose-dive. I was up to about a couple of hours a day, mostly last thing every night, but now I spend that time on my laptop, burning through Credits on Suno and stitching fragments together into songs in Audacity.

I'm still paying several subscriptions to streaming services all the same, though, so I feel obligated to make at least some use of all of them. We did pause Netflix for three months but I re-started it for Wednesday (And happily caught the finale of Upload around the same time.)

While I was looking through the schedules for more to watch, so as to get my money's-worth, I noticed the missing seasons of couple of shows I had been following a few months ago had miraculously appeared. 

One of them was Roswell: New Mexico, for which Netflix very annoyingly had held the license to Seasons 1 and 2 in the UK but not Seasons 3 and 4, which were exclusive to Sky over here a the time (If I remember right...). That was great but also too late because, when I finished the first two seasons, I didn't want to pay yet another sub so I used a VPN to watch them on Netflix USA.

Even more annoying was Young Sheldon, for which Netflix had the rights to stream six out of seven seasons in both the UK and the US but no rights to the final season for either. That was on some US station or service I forget now. All I do remember about it was that I couldn't watch it, even with a VPN.

Well, that agreement, whatever it was, must be over now because Netflix has the full run available to stream. I was finally able to catch up with the show. I'll tell you what I thought of it later.

Our other streaming service is Amazon Prime but that one pays for itself in shipping alone, particularly since Mrs. Bhagpuss buys at least one thing on Amazon pretty much every day. What with that and the games and music offers included in the bundle, I feel no urge to watch anything on Prime at all if I don't feel like it. 

The problem there is that I also have Apple+ through Prime as an add-on. It was very cheap for three months and I didn't really care if I was watching anything on Apple+ or not but now it's back up to full price it seems like I should at least watch something. Mrs Bhagpuss doesn't currently watch anything on the channel at all so it's up to me to pick up the slack. 

Luckily, there's no shortage of good stuff to choose from. I thought about starting several series about which I'd heard good things - Severance, Slow Horses, Foundation, The Studio - but in the end I decided on Ted Lasso. Main reason: the episodes were shorter. Secondary reason: I like sitcoms.

I have now watched all of Young Sheldon Season 7 and Ted Lasso Season 1. The end of one story, the start of another. Here's what I thought about them both.

Young Sheldon - Season 7

I was quite dubious about the whole concept of Young Sheldon to begin with. I've never been a huge fan of prequels (Is anyone?) and prequels built around main characters as children can come across as a bit desperate. Added to that, this is just one character from an ensemble show, one that relies almost entirely on the particular skills of the specific actor who played him, and it's a character often considered to be difficult and controversial. 

The prospects didn't look good but contrary to expectations it turned out to be a warm, comfortable, enjoyable watch. A lot less spiky and brittle than the show that spawned it, in fact.

Of course, it also had one other, major problem, something common to all long-running shows that revolve around a young child. Children grow up. 

In one respect, that worked in Young Sheldon's favor. Old Sheldon, if we can call him that, is a divisive figure in The Big Bang Theory. A lot of people have some very valid objections to the character in terms of the way it can appear to promote and perpetuate some stereotypically negative views of neuro-diversity. I personally feel the full character arc, taken across the entire run of the show, counters many of those objections, producing a nuanced and distinctly positive image of someone struggling with numerous challenges they find it hard to overcome.

Even if that's true, though, you'd need to have watched the entire 279 episodes to appreciate it. And no-one who thinks Sheldon is an offensive caricature is going to sit through 93 hours of a show that makes their skin crawl just to see if maybe it wasn't quite as bad as they thought it was after all. As the saying goes, that's an awful lot of Shawshank before you get to the Redemption.

I didn't think Young Sheldon had the same level of difficulty. In TBBT, there are five central characters and it's not hard to make an argument that all of them are potentially offensive in the way they're written and performed. Young Sheldon just has... young Sheldon. And he's kinda cute. 

All those mannerisms and affectations that seem so mannered and performative in an adult seem a lot softer and more relatable in a child. Kids, after all, do say and do the darnedest things, don't they? And it is undeniably satisfying, if you've watched a lot of TBBT, to see many of Sheldon's tropes and foibles from that show get their start in some specific event in this one, usually for an understandable and sympathetic reason.

All of that is in the show as a whole, though. What about the final season? 

Well, the most striking thing about it is that Sheldon isn't actually in it all that much. He's in every episode but he's rarely the central character and the main story arcs seldom revolve around him. He's almost a peripheral character at times, chipping in with a few side-stories or popping up to add some extra perspective to someone else's story.

Mostly, it's about his family, all of whom get some significant character development that changes or enhances what we knew about them. For example...

(This bit might get a bit spoilery from here on down...)

Meemaw really starts to show her age as she loses her home, her business and her freedom all in quick succession. Her veneer of invincibility begins to peel away and her indomitable spirit wilts a little. Missy shows a good deal of unexpected maturity and character growth as does Georgie, albeit each in very different ways. Sheldon's mother's religious beliefs start to move her closer to the mania seen in the adult show, while his father... dies.

That was a shock, even though if I'd been counting the passage of time I ought to have expected it. It happens right towards the end of the run, just when everything seems to be going pretty well for him and the family. 

I was not best pleased when it happened, not only because I liked the character as played by Lance Barber but because I had Young Sheldon firmly in my "Send me off to sleep in a good mood." slot and it seemed like it was going to finish with a couple of episodes where all the cast would be in mourning and filled with grief. Not what I want, right before I nod off.

In the end, though, the whole thing was handled very gently, not side-stepping the emotions but not losing the warmth and humor either. It was a particularly telling way to show some of Sheldon's emotional growth or lack of it, too, something I also thought was well-handled.

As a run, I'd call Young Sheldon a success. It lasted seven seasons, which is more than decent for a sitcom. It kept the whole cast together and it was consistently written and well-played throughout by an excellent ensemble cast. It was great to see Annie Potts and Ed Begley Jr. in meaty roles again, too. 

The underlying problem of child actors turning into adult actors was kept to a minimum by the unusual expedient of partially writing the lead character out of his own show. Missy and Georgie both seemed to age at a rate that allowed the audience barely to notice it happening but by Season 7, Iain Armitage, playing Sheldon, looked very odd indeed, like a much older child playing a much younger one.

The same mannerisms that had made him a cute-if-quirky kid turned him into a slightly disturbing adolescent, never changing his expression, keeping his hands stiffly by his sides and always wearing awkwardly formal clothes. That looks funny in an eight-year old but uncomfortable and unsettling in a teenager. It's not surprising they mostly wrote around him towards the end.

The ensemble cast was uniformly excellent. I liked everyone, which is ideal for a sitcom. I especially enjoyed Annie Potts as Meemaw and her double act with Craig T Nelson as her lover, Dale, was always a joy. The entire cast - and it's a big one counting all the regular supporting parts - was on top form throughout and possibly the highest praise I can offer is that, by the end of the final season, I think I liked every one of the characters more than I had at the start.

Actually, the highest praise I can offer is that I'd happily watch the whole run again. Which I almost certainly will.

Ted Lasso - Season 1 

I'd heard a little about this show. I'd heard it was heart-warming, upbeat and positive. I'd heard it was nice. I also knew it was about a sports coach and, of course, that it was an American sitcom. When I was looking for something to replace Young Sheldon, it seemed like another sweet slice of Americana to send me off to sleep smiling.

Yeah. About that...

It's not "nice", is it?  It's not all that sweet either. It's acerbic and sharp and occasionally even a little bitter. Ted Lasso (The character no the show.) is irony personified.

For one thing, he may be American and a sports coach but he's not in America and he's not coaching an American sport. Somehow, in all the things I'd read, I hadn't picked up on the "Sit" in the sitcom, which is that he's in London, coaching at a Premier League football club.

Or, rather, managing one, which I'm not sure they ever actually say. Everyone keeps calling him "Coach" but he's doing the job we usually call "Manager" over here and he has an actual coach standing next to him, who everyone also calls "Coach". 

The show is full of oddnesses like that. I'd say it does 98% of a great job of being as convincing about life in modern Britain as 98% of British sitcoms can manage but the 2% differences are wholly different in each case.

The writing doesn't actually lean that heavily into the one-language-two-cultures comedy you'd expect. There's plenty of that around the margins but it's never the point of the show. Ironically, that makes the moments when cultural infelicities do pop up all the more obvious. 

For example, there's some considerable business in several episodes about American sport not accepting a tie as a valid result. Which is fine. Except that we don't really use the expression "tie" all that much over here.

Ted always uses the word "tie" in Season 1. Every British or British-localized speaker he uses it to uses it back to him, frequently when no-one here would ever use the word in that way. We'd almost always say "draw", which is what we call a sports match where the scores end up tied.  We use tie as a verb routinely but rarely as a noun.  

In fact, just to make it even more confusing, a "tie" as a noun in a sporting comment usually means a fixture or a match. As in "a cup tie". But then, a draw can be a fixture, too, as in "We got Chelsea in the next round - that's a tough draw." 

I can see how it could be confusing but I'm not even that into sports and it's all just second-nature to me because I grew up here. When the word-choices don't ring true, it's distracting. And clearly I'm not the only one who noticed because, in the first episode of Season 2, when ties/draws become a big plot point, both words are used and a context for the different usage is established. It's just a shame they didn't think of that in Season 1.

All of which might seem like nit-picking but it's a real nit-picking kind of show. It's full of little bits of business about cultural differences and expectations and about how sports teams operate, all of which revolve around nuances of language and fine details of procedure or practice.

I found all that quite engaging. And enlightening.

For example, a while back, Wilhelm posted something on TAGN about bottled water and I left a comment in which I referred to drinking carbonated bottled water, to which Wilhelm pointed out that Americans generally wouldn't see much point in drinking fizzy water - they'd just drink soda if they wanted fizz. 

I did not know that. Despite having steeped myself in Americana, second-hand, through comics, books, TV, music and movies since I was a child, I had never come across the idea that sparkling water was un-American. And now here it is as a running gag in Ted Lasso, where he keeps being given glasses of water to drink and he takes a huge swig, expecting it to be plain, then spits it all over himself or someone else because it turns out to be sparkling. Who knew? 

There's plenty like that but the strength of the show isn't so much in the jokes as the characters. Or perhaps I should say the caricatures, which is what they seem like, at least in the first few episodes. It takes a good while before the nuances and subtleties begin to reveal themselves or, I ought to say, are revealed by the writers. 

And by the end of the season, I still wasn't sure just how much depth lay beneath most of the surfaces. The hints at anything more are so brief, so fleeting, it sometimes felt as though I was imagining them. Keeley is a bit older and smarter than she seems, Coach Beard has some quite peculiar-sounding sexual history, Jamie Tartt has an overbearing dad...

Even as I try to tally those glimpses of character, though, I realize how little is really there. Everything is suggestion, misdirection, sleight-of-hand. After ten episodes, how much do we really know about anyone? Not much more than you could write on an index card.

Except, maybe, for Ted. He has some depths and they are, largely, hidden. Not from the audience, who get to see him alone in his apartment at night, but from everyone around him.

To everyone else, he's relentlessly upbeat but it doesn't seem to have gotten him all that far. He coached one successful season of what I think must have been college football and then got head-hunted by a vengeful divorcee in the expectation his skills would not be transferable and he would be a disaster as the "coach" of a top-flight club in the English Premier League, whose prospects she hoped to damage so as to upset her (Unbearable.) ex.

Meanwhile, that very same relentlessly upbeat tendency is revealed as the proximate cause of Ted's own impending divorce. He's so fucking nice his wife can't stand to be around him any more.

Surprised by that swear-word I just threw in, seemingly so unnecessarily? That's the show. It does that All. The. Time. It's another thing I wasn't expecting. When someone tells you a sitcom is really nice and the main character is really nice and "nice" is the word you hear associated with it more than any other, you're probably expecting something along the lines of a live-action Wallace and Grommit. Not a swear-fest. Which is what you get.

It's a really sweary show. Everyone says "fuck" all the time. Except Ted. Who also says it but only when it matters. Unlike over-the-hill superstar Roy Kent, who has a series of running gags revolving around the F-word, which he uses at every opportunity and in front of anyone including, repeatedly and hilariously, his niece and a bunch of her eight-year old pals. The funniest thing about it is his complete unawareness that it's not entirely acceptable behavior. He ends up dropping a bunch of F-bombs in his first post-footballing career gig as a TV pundit, which predictably endears him to the audience, if not the presenters. (Although that's at the start of Season 2 so I shouldn't mention it here...)

I do like me some good, creative swearing, so it's a plus point as far as I'm concerned. And Roy's probably my favorite character, unless that's Keeley.

It's a good show, sweary or not. I'm not quite convinced it's a great show, the way it seems to have been pitched in some of the things I've read about it, but it's funny and the characters are likeable and it has that hard-to-resist sports narrative running in the background all the time, where even though it's all made up, you still want to know whether the team is going to win or not.

Just let's not talk about the actual footballing scenes. Has any show ever got those right? I doubt it. Some of them here have been quite painful to watch, and as I say I'm not even a sports fan.

I am a sitcom fan, though, and this is a good one. I'm on Season 2 now and I notice, looking ahead, that the episodes are longer throughout. I'm guessing that means more plot and deeper characterization rather than more jokes but I'll be happy, either way.