In the New York Magazine review of the soft-reboot fourth season of “Ted Lasso,” critic Nicholas Quah argues that Apple TV’s return of Jason Sudeikis’ relentlessly optimistic coach feels forced and stuck in purgatory. After undercutting Ted’s happy Kansas ending to bring him back to coach AFC Richmond’s new women’s team, the Lady Greyhounds, the show recycles its familiar fish-out-of-water formula while flattening real issues in women’s sports into simplistic lessons and self-congratulatory awareness—prioritizing sterile niceness over complexity or genuine conflict. “Smug liberalism that mistakes sensitivity for insight,” is how Quah describes it.
Nicholas Quah for New York Magazine:
The opening volley of this season exhibits the very same problem that plagued the bloated back half of Ted Lasso’s original run: Its unwavering commitment to a morally uncomplicated worldview leaves little room for texture, ambiguity, or any semblance of actual conflict. Rather than truly exploring its characters or any of the ideas it routinely gestures toward, the show routinely loops back into a smooth fantasy where everyone is fundamentally decent and reconciliation is the default destination. That flattening impulse is most apparent in the season’s handling of women’s sports, ostensibly its central concern. Early in the premiere, Higgins wanders into the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, where an employee named Charles recounts the struggle Black players endured integrating professional baseball. “They didn’t do it for fame or fortune,” he says. “They did it because to not play would have been unacceptable.” When Higgins responds that the story reminds him of the decades women in England were barred from playing football, Charles immediately pushes back. “Not similar, sorry,” Higgins concedes. “What happened here — much worse, much, much worse.” It’s quintessential Ted Lasso. The show acknowledges the two histories aren’t equivalent yet invokes the comparison anyway, congratulating itself for recognizing the distinction while still harvesting the emotional weight of the analogy. Rather than examining the cross-comparative history with any depth, it settles for the reassuring glow of its own awareness, a form of smug liberalism that mistakes sensitivity for insight…
Professional sports involve hard questions about investment, infrastructure, and sustainability. The series briefly acknowledges as much when Rebecca and Higgins commission a study concluding that the women’s team is financially risky, only to brush it aside because it’s the right thing to do and they believe themselves special. The tension between principle and practicality — the very thing that could make this story interesting — gets mostly waved off, sublimated instead into interpersonal hang-ups.
MacDailyNews Take: Through two episodes, “Ted Lasso” is already pretty cringey this season (but less so than in season three, blessedly).
It seems that Hollywood’s perennial Achilles heel is once again bared: The “oh-so enlightened” simply can’t resist the urge to lecture their soon-to-be-former audience on how they should think, even when it means torching their own product in the process.
When even New York Magazine, hardly a bastion of conservatism, sees it clearly and publishes it… ouch!
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