This week, Apple TV tweeted a picture of “Ted Lasso” characters Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), and Nathan “Nate the Great” Shelley (Nick Mohammed) in the AFC Richmond locker room with a simple sentence: “Smells like potential.”
Last week, Hunt did an “Ask Me Anything” Q&A on Reddit. In response to a question about a fourth season of “Ted Lasso” or a potential spinoff, Hunt replied, “We don’t know. We need a break and will take one presently. Nothing has been ruled out, everything is possible; but that includes the possibility that we’re done. We won’t know until we’ve sat with it for a while, decompressed, etc.”
In the first – and, potentially, only – three seasons of “Ted Lasso,” Jason Sudeikis plays Ted Lasso, a small-time college football coach from Kansas hired to coach a professional soccer team in England, despite having no experience coaching soccer.
In addition to starring, Sudeikis serves as executive producer, alongside Bill Lawrence (“Scrubs”) via his Doozer Productions, in association with Warner Bros. Television and Universal Television, a division of NBCUniversal Content. Doozer’s Jeff Ingold also serves as an executive producer with Liza Katzer as co-executive producer. The series was developed by Sudeikis, Lawrence, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, and is based on the pre-existing format and characters from NBC Sports.
MacDailyNews Take: Smells like a spinoff*!
Looks like they’re going to rely on the strength of the characters to drive “Ted Lasso” (or a newly-named series, “AFC Richmnond,” perhaps?) without “Ted Lasso” himself, or with reduced work for Sudeikis where we check in with him from time to time as he bonds with his son (season 3 set the stage for that, moving Ted into a noticeably lesser role).
Spinoffs like this have worked in TV history (think “Fraiser,” “Melrose Place,” and “Better Call Saul”) and so have series that continued without their lead actors (“Spin City,” “Downton Abbey,” “Two And A Half Men).
*or a continuation sans titular character
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“Ted Lasso, AR”
How things have changed.
We used to get 22-26 episodes per season.
These guys need to stop for a break after three 12-episode seasons.
Streaming isn’t regimented to set lengths like broadcast TV.
On traditional networks, an “hour” show runs 41-42 min. Half hour shows run 21-22 mins.
“Ted Lasso” Running times
29–33 minutes (season 1)
30–49 minutes (season 2)
43–78 minutes (season 3)
Making something of quality is always more work than the usual dreck we see!
And get well paid for it. 🙂
Nate’s character has been ruined. First he’s evil, then – with no ramifications for being evil and no redemptive arc – he’s not. The result is an unbelievable, unlikeable, and annoying character.
Would be better without him.
Same could be said of Keeley. What was her arc about?
She was so much better as a part of the team.
The Nate story was off to a brilliant start, and then it went nowhere. We learned nothing about him, he learned nothing about himself, and the team gained nothing from the arc.
I agree. The Keeley character also massively lost its way.
However, she started out as a more interesting and delightful character than Nate, so I’d be happy to see them try to revive that.
I loved ted lasso initially, but the increasing cheesiness got to be too much for me.