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Give credit to the England women’s national football team — nicknamed the Lionesses — for inspiring the return of “Ted Lasso.” The team won the UEFA Women’s Championship in 2022, right as Jason Sudeikis and company
were shooting Season 3 of “Ted Lasso,” and the celebrations around the Lionesses’ victory were infectious.
“We got to watch in real time as the country went from ‘oh right, yeah, sure, women’s football’ to ‘yes! The Lionesses are the greatest ever!’ because they beat Germany in added time at Wembley,” says Brendan Hunt, the “Ted Lasso” co-creator, executive producer and writer who also plays Coach Beard. “Suddenly, the whole country was women’s football crazy in a way that they had not been a mere five weeks earlier. So that really stuck with us. Once we were on break, I think that idea just continued to take hold in Jason’s head.”
“Ted Lasso” ended its Season 3 — which at the time was pretty much considered a series finale — with a little bit of a potential future story: AFC Richmond team owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) and her best friend Keeley (Juno Temple) were mulling adding a women’s team to their organization.
“We definitely wanted to leave ourselves a breadcrumb, in case we wanted to find our way back,” Hunt says. “The women’s team idea was kind of like, ‘all right,’ because that’s just part of the reality. Almost every Premier League team has a women’s team … Once we were on break, I think that idea just continued to take hold in Jason’s head. It certainly helped that he was already a fan of the WNBA. He’s had season tickets to the New York Liberty for a while. He walks to their games, so it all just finally came together.”
Hunt says the idea of bringing “Ted Lasso” back took some time, as Sudeikis pondered the idea. “There would be one sort of baby-step text message of intrigue, like every three months,” he says. “I never got my hopes up. I really wanted to do it, but I wanted him to want to do it. I didn’t want to be among the people who were pushing him or pressuring him. So I never brought it up. Anytime he brought it up, I’d be like, ‘sounds good,’ and then wait and see if it ever came up again. When finally I got the word of, ‘it’s happening. We’re going do that women’s team thing that I’ve been thinking about,’ it was like ‘great! Now I can get on with my life! Let’s go!’”
But first, Sudeikis, Hunt, Brett Goldstein (who also plays the gruff Roy Kent, now AFC Richmond’s coach), new exec producer Jack Burditt and the rest of the writers had to figure out how to reintroduce Ted Lasso to the world of “Ted Lasso.” When we last saw Ted (played, of course, by Sudeikis), he had returned home to Kansas City after a successful, unlikely run as coach of AFC Richmond. What was the story they wanted to tell now?
The writers rented a house in Ojai, California, to go on retreat hash it out. “We all stayed in this one big house, and we would just get up in the morning, meet in the dining room, and just chat,” Hunt says. “If we came back, what would it be? What could it be? And at that point, we weren’t even officially going to do the women’s team yet. But it was definitely in the air, and we still talked about a few options.”
Among ideas were ways to keep the show in the U.S.: One idea had Rebecca purchasing Los Angeles’ Angel City FC women’s soccer club. But ultimately, all agreed that AFC Richmond and London were critical parts of “Ted Lasso.”
“We didn’t leave there with anything definite, but we definitely left that Ojai time to be like, ‘well yeah, there’s still stuff to do with these characters, and there’s probably new ones we haven’t even thought about yet.’”
Luckily, some of the key “Ted Lasso” stars, including Waddingham and Goldstein, were still under contract, and Temple was eager to return as well. And for Hunt, “I was never not going to do it!”
The writers went about crafting a scenario that would make sense for bringing Ted back to Richmond: When we see him again, Ted seems content working as the assistant manager at a grocery store and attending his son’s soccer games. But no one — his son, his ex-wife, his mother — seems too jazzed with what Ted’s up to, given what they know he just accomplished overseas.
Everything changes when Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) show up in Kansas City. They pitch Ted on the idea of returning to coach the new AFC Richmond women’s team. While in town, they visit a Kansas City Current women’s soccer game and Rebecca falls in love with the town’s famous barbecue. Ultimately, Ted is encouraged by his mother — and even his son and ex-wife, who are both looking for a scenery change — to take the gig.
“There is a strong TV-making argument for ‘just skip all that! He’s back. Who cares?’” Hunt says of adding all of that backstory to the first episode. “But that’s just not our way. We wanted to show how this would happen and try to play that to the eye of the audience’s intelligence, but also, get through it efficiently and entertainingly. To have real concrete reasons that we could experience seeing again with the audience as to why this would happen, that felt important. So that we’re not just, in one pen stroke or one PDF, undoing everything that we’ve been doing before.”
In revamping the show, the biggest change came in adding new characters to fill out the women’s team. That started with Tanya Reynolds as coach Alice Chilton, a dour character who’s not a fan of Ted’s arrival — and quickly threatens to quit.
“I’m very excited for people to meet Tanya Reynolds as Alice Chilton, the third coach in our trio,” Hunt says. “She’s just so funny, on screen and off. I think people are going to dig her a lot.”
Meanwhile, the status of the Richmond players from the first three seasons is also soon made clear: Jamie Tartt, for example, has moved on to play for FC Barcelona — a convenient way to explain why star Phil Dunster (now seen on HBO Max’s “Rooster”) isn’t back. “Phil was going to be busy, but also, it would have strained credulity a bit further than we wanted to if all the old team were still on Richmond,” Hunt says. “If this team is doing so well, then the best players would be gone. They’d be bought by bigger clubs.”
With Jamie gone, it also clears the lane for the “will-they-or-won’t-they” storyline between Keeley and Roy Kent. “The two of them have a chemistry together, whether they are being romantic or not,” he says. “We’ll see if that can get back to anything proper as we go.”
Rebecca, meanwhile, has her long-distance relationship with the still-unnamed Dutch pilot (Matteo van der Grijn). And there’s a weird tension between Beard — now Roy’s assistant coach — and Ted, now that he’s returned. Or maybe Beard is just all messed up because of some as-yet unexplained tension with his wife, Jane.
“The thing we don’t know yet is he like this because he misses Ted this much, and this is how not being with Ted affects him? Or is there something going on at home with Jane?” Hunt says. ‘Because when last we saw them, things appeared to be a happy ending. But we know Jane too well to just completely believe that.”
Sudeikis, Hunt and the producers have embraced the phrase “leap before you look” as the theme of this new season. What do they mean by that? “We can be very cautious in our lives, and especially in our post-COVID world, where everyone’s just real timid,” Hunt says. “As a world, we’re all very nervous, and you need to push sometimes to really live. And sometimes that push has got to come from you. The world itself isn’t going to do it. So yeah, ‘leaping before you look’ sounds absolutely terrifying, but is also incredibly necessary to try to live your life as full as you can.”
Sudeikis ultimately had a three-season plan for the first round of “Ted Lasso.” Is there another three seasons in the works now? Says Hunt: “I wouldn’t say that there’s a plan exactly, but there’s definitely crossed fingers.”
