Ted Lasso’s third season was unfocused and unwieldy, but it stuck

Photo of author

By Webdesk


In the opening episode of Ted LassoIn the third season of the third season, the ever-cheerful coach (Jason Sudeikis) found himself caught between two worlds: the desire to stay with his football club, AFC Richmond, in England and complete some unfinished business with a found family and his need to return home. to the US and be with a son who misses him dearly. It caused a full-blown existential crisis — and as the season progressed, the show itself experienced something similar.

With explosive episode runtimes overflowing with storylines, the show found itself somewhere between the sitcom it started with and the prestige drama it seemed to want to be. The result was a show that was unwieldy at times, losing track of the things that made it such a phenomenon in the first place, while making some strange and unnecessary detours. Thankfully, while the finale was long and self-indulgent, it stayed focused – sending Coach Lasso off with a beautiful farewell.

This review contains spoilers for all three seasons of Ted Lasso.

Now a lot happened in season 3. The dozen hour-long episodes tried to weave together a number of different threads in what seemed like an attempt by the writers to cram in as much as possible before it was over. But somehow the season both felt too full And as if many of those threads were woefully underdeveloped. It made for an awkward beast of a show.

The focus on drama often meant laughs were hard to come by, while the sprawling storylines ensured that the main parts of the drama – Nate’s (Nick Mohammed) resignation as manager at rival West Ham, Coach Beard’s (Brendan Hunt) dark history, Keeley’s (Juno Temple) grappling with the fallout from a sex tape leak, or even how AFC Richmond somehow managed to win 15 games in a row – were either not explored enough or, in some cases, like Nate’s resigned, not even shown on screen. I sometimes felt like I had missed an episode and was playing catch up.

That’s not to say there weren’t great moments. A painfully hilarious training session with a red thread brought me to tears, and there were wonderful explorations of secondary characters, like seeing Leslie (Jeremy Swift) embrace his love of jazz during a trip to Amsterdam or Dani’s (Cristo Fernández) surprising turn from supportive friend to cold foe as his team from Mexico took on Van Damme’s (Moe Jeudy-Lamour) Canada in a game. Yes, these were distractions that didn’t help the season’s bloated problem, but they were short, full, and helped the cast develop naturally. But because the episodes were both so long and so unfocused, these highlights were muddled by a show that was just trying to do too much.

At first glance, the finale – aptly unsubtlely titled “So Long, Farewell” – seems to follow. I mean, it takes a whopping 75 minutes. But despite that long runtime, the episode remains focused on the moment, saying goodbye to Ted and tying up most of the loose ends.

At the beginning of the episode, Ted has already made up his mind. Before the last game of the season, he is going to leave Richmond to go back home to Kansas to be with his kid. Everyone knows he’s leaving. Team owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) tries to persuade Ted to stay, offering a hefty pay rise and also subtly threatening to sell the club if he leaves. The team, meanwhile, goes full Lasso and sends him off with a choreographed number of The sound of music during their last workout together.

The stakes are high in the run-up to the final game. Richmond has a chance to pull off an underdog story and win the league and coincidentally finds himself up against West Ham, the club owned by Rebecca’s supervillain ex-husband Rupert (Anthony Head). For once, Ted Lasso, the show about football, actually spends quite a bit of time on the game itself, and watching all the drama unfold – unlikely as many are – had the same thrill as a real game. I found myself screaming at the screen in the same way I did when my beloved Bayern Munich stole the German championship at the last minute.

Really, the finale crouches down to the core features of the show: sweet but silly moments, oddly effective motivational speeches, lots of tears, and extremely on-the-nose moments where everyone comes together, like when every member of Richmond gets a little piece of the iconic (and torn) ‘faith’ sign. The episode is pretty predictable, but also, damn it, they got me. When you’ve spent so much time with these characters, it’s hard not to choke when you see things like Keeley proposing to add a women’s team to Richmond (finally!) or Roy (Brett Goldstein) starting therapy (also finally !). Even the moments that seem a bit at perfect, as Rebecca encounters her mysterious Dutch hunk at the airport, are at least nice and satisfying. There’s a real catharsis to the episode, especially when it comes to Nate’s awaited redemption story and Rupert getting his comeuppance.

This is what good sitcom finales do: remind you why you loved these characters in the first place. Ted Lasso may have starred in prestigious drama, but this is no end to guess who wins as in Game of Thrones or Succession. The results of the big game are ultimately not that important. It’s more like the last episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: knowing that things are going to change for these people but that everyone is moving in the right direction.

Despite an ending that seems ripped out of a rom-com (which Ted comments on, of course), Ted Lasso is ultimately about friendship and the things we can learn from other people. In that way, the finale was a perfect fit: It shows how painful it can be when these relationships change, but how necessary that change is for all of us. You just have to, you know, believe.

All three seasons of Ted Lasso streaming now on Apple TV Plus.



Source link

Share via
Copy link