Ted Lasso Returns: Jason Sudeikis on Fresh Season 4 Story, New Team

In early February 2024, Jason Sudeikis convened the writers of Ted Lasso in Ojai, California. At his urging, the show had aired its third and purportedly final season a year or so earlier, but now he was having second thoughts. “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s done,’ ” says the creator and star. So, he gathered everyone at the Ojai Valley Inn to see whether there was more story to mine.

By then, a few different ideas for potential spinoffs had been bandied about. Brett Goldstein and co-creator Joe Kelly had started working on an idea about former captain Roy Kent, while another two staffers played around with one about the character Keeley Jones. Even Sudeikis says he was toying with both a Leslie Higgins cartoon and a Dani Rojas telenovela. But his Notes app was also increasingly full of ideas for a continuation of the mother ship, and, at that point, he wanted to see where everyone else was at.

“We were just kind of kicking the tires on it — or, as we were saying at the time, checking the viability of the soil,” says Brendan Hunt, a co-creator who plays Coach Beard on the show. They all liked the idea of a women’s soccer team as Coach Lasso’s new purview — an idea that was teased in the season three finale — but where, how and who else would be involved was still up for debate. “It all seems easy now, but it was hard because it’s not a spinoff,” notes Goldstein, another writer who also plays Roy. “You’re like, it’s not Frasier; Cheers still exists — it’s more like you’re adding a room to the bar.”

When Ted Lasso returns for its long-awaited, once inconceivable fourth season on Aug. 5, it will feature AFC Richmond’s all-female team rather than the male one at the center of the past three seasons — though fan favorites like Ted (Sudeikis), Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), Keeley (Juno Temple) and Roy (Goldstein) will all be back. But after more than three years without any new episodes, it’s impossible to predict how much of the series’ once-massive fan base will return with it. The last time Lasso aired, in 2023, it was the year’s most watched streaming original, racking up 283 million viewing hours. In the two seasons prior, the famously feel-good show had become an emotional lifeline for its COVID-era viewership and one of TV’s most decorated series, winning 13 Emmys (including two best comedy trophies) and a Peabody.

When it came to doing more, Sudeikis had been the only holdout. Having worked on nothing but Lasso for the better part of five years, writing or rewriting every script in addition to starring as the team’s relentlessly positive coach, he was thoroughly exhausted. In that time, he’d also gone through a very public, very nasty split with Olivia Wilde, his longtime partner and the mother of his two children, now 12 and 9. None of the other castmembers or co-creators had the gall to start pressing him for more. “So, we’d just reach out to each other,” says Waddingham, “and go, ‘Have you heard?’ ‘Have you heard?’ ‘Have you heard?’ “

From the outset, Sudeikis had said that he had three seasons of Lasso in his head, and despite collecting $1 million per episode by season three (and significantly more if he agreed to continue), he wasn’t eager to keep going just to keep going. “That wasn’t a negotiation tactic,” Sudeikis says over drinks in mid-June. “The story was told. Ted went home [to Kansas City] to be with his son. I wasn’t going to have Ted uproot their life to justify the money truck. It made no sense to me.” 

Artistic integrity is noble, of course, but there was something else that had started to nag at him, and it was becoming increasingly hard to ignore: Ted Lasso wasn’t just another project for Sudeikis. He’d created a universe that was bigger than he was — and when fans would tell him that the series had saved them, he’d often reply, “It saved me, too.” He wasn’t being flippant. Not at all. “It is infectious to play a character who sees the best in people and isn’t mad at the world for all its foibles and bullies and shadows,” he says. “It’s not like I’m Daniel Day-Lewis, but it was good to live in that — to have that coursing through your brain and your body all day.” He sits back, looks up. Then: “It still is.”

***

The seeds of Ted Lasso were planted when NBC Sports acquired American broadcast rights to the English Premier League in 2013. As then-marketing head John Miller recalls, NBC initially approached John Oliver, a soccer-loving Brit, to front its promo campaign, but he’d just been tapped to sub in as The Daily Show host while Jon Stewart was off directing a movie. Chris Pratt is said to have passed, too. Sudeikis, who’d played at least one coach during his decade-long tenure at Saturday Night Live, was pinged soon after. A sports fan and former high school basketball star, he figured why not?

Sudeikis recruited his buddies Hunt and Kelly, with whom he’d done loads of improv and played the FIFA video game for hours earlier in his career. Together, they beefed up an ad agency’s fish-out-of-water concept about a buffoonish American football coach who despite knowing nothing about soccer is hired to coach a team in England’s Premier League — and then is swiftly fired. In its first week, the spot snagged 3 million views. Half a year later, nearly 22 million had watched it on NBC Sports’ YouTube page. Buoyed by its success, the trio produced a follow-up in 2014, featuring a slightly softer, if still buffoonish, version of Coach Lasso, though this time he was coaching a middle-school girls team. The campaign ended there, but Sudeikis couldn’t get the character out of his head.

At Wilde’s suggestion, he invited Kelly and Hunt to hole up at their home for a few days in early 2015 to flesh it out as a potential series and very quickly mapped out much of what season one became. Lasso, they decided, would remain a soccer neophyte but also be a genuinely good guy, one who didn’t so much as curse — a departure for Sudeikis, who was used to playing the cad in films like Hall Pass and Horrible Bosses. The NBC Sports Network wanted in and brought aboard the BBC to help. At one point, the trio went to London to meet with potential collaborators, including Catastrophe‘s Sharon Horgan, whom Sudeikis says he briefly considered for the role of Rebecca, the fiercely determined owner of AFC Richmond.

In the end, the timing wasn’t right. Kelly was about to start his Comedy Central sitcom Detroiters, and Sudeikis was about to start a family. So the idea sat there for a few more years until Sudeikis was able to enlist veteran showrunner Bill Lawrence to come run it. Lawrence had initially reached out to Sudeikis about starring in Bad Monkey (a role that ultimately went to Vince Vaughn). Still, Lawrence was familiar with the Lasso ads and loved what Sudeikis had shared about a potential series. He was in, though his enthusiasm wasn’t widely shared. In fact, they pitched it to the various streamers in mid-2018, and only Apple bit. “No matter what we said, people would immediately assume [based on the ads], ‘Oh, so it’s a silly, broad, sketchy cartoon show,’ ” Lawrence told THR in 2023. “And that was not what Jason wanted to do.”

Sudeikis was adamant that the show be filmed in the U.K. — which is also where it was cast with a slew of actors largely unknown to U.S. audiences — and that it have a British sensibility. “And what was in vogue for most comedies at that time was to be really, really fast-paced and, I don’t mean this as an insult, but really American,” says Hunt, noting that the British Office was their North Star. “We had a lot of pauses, a lot of silent shots of people looking at other people, and that pace inherently changes the tone, and I’m not sure everyone at Apple or Warner Bros. saw the tone that Jason was imagining until it was finally in front of them in the editing room — and I think even then they were shitting themselves. Then, when it finally came out, they were like, ‘Oh, right. No, no, you’re great. We knew. We knew.’ “

In fairness, the cast and crew weren’t certain that Lasso would land either, and not simply because Apple was still brand new to the TV business. “In fact, myself and Brett Goldstein stood behind the craft truck [on the last day of shooting season one],” says Waddingham, “and, bear in mind, he’s a writer on it as well, and we were like [whispers], ‘I don’t know whether it knows what it is.’ “

Then it premiered on a Friday in August 2020, five months into COVID lockdown, and began rolling out new episodes weekly to an audience starved for uplifting content. “We were still in the sourdough bread-baking, cheering-for-the-essential-workers phase of the pandemic, when even just the rallying cry ‘Believe’ was something that everybody wanted,” says Channing Dungey, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. TV Group, which produces the show. “The characters and the humanity and just the belief in the underdog — those things resonated at a time when we, as a nation and as a world, really needed to heal.” 

The following Monday, Sudeikis got a call from Apple: The streamer wanted a second season. Soon after, they greenlit a third. By the time awards season rolled around, Lasso had become a cultural phenomenon and a darling of the industry. NBC’s Miller, whose involvement ended with the second ad — though a title card about the show being based on a preexisting format and characters from NBC Sports remains — says he was tempted to send the creators a note that said: “I feel like a sperm donor at a beauty pageant.”

***

By season two, they had to kill a dog.

The series return opened with the team’s greyhound mascot, Earl, slain by an errant penalty kick. The scene was as much a setup for a season that delves deeper into mental health issues as it was a reminder that Lasso is still just a TV comedy, which became increasingly easy to forget — even for those making it. 

The fandom, which included a ballooning contingent of thought leaders like Brené Brown, kept growing in number and in volume. At one point, even President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden invited the Lasso cast to the White House, where the show’s “Believe” sign hung above the door, as it did in the AFC Richmond locker room. “So, partially to make sure that we weren’t getting high on our own supply and partially to remind people, ‘I’m glad you think that we’re a force of cultural good, but that’s not what it says on the tin and it’s never been our remit,’ [Jason was like,] ‘What we’re going to have to do now is kill a dog,’ ” recounts Hunt, acknowledging that the decision was highly controversial in the room and upstairs, but, he adds, “It was another example of Jason being like, ‘No, we’re doing this,’ and then suddenly that is what we’re shooting.”

The second season scored another 20 Emmy nominations and once again won best comedy, beating out shows like Hacks, Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm. By the time season three was underway, Lawrence had left to focus on Shrinking and Bad Monkey, and Sudeikis began running Lasso largely on his own. Shortly after the season premiered, Lawrence told THR: “It was healthy for me to let go the third year because Jason is Ted Lasso and, especially landing the plane, deserves it to be his vision — and I’ve reached a point in my career where I’m not the best at having to listen to other people over my own opinion.”

Several associated with the show say there had been tension mounting between the two men, though Sudeikis shoots down rumors of any real fight. “Bill never yelled at me and I never yelled at him,” he says, then adds: “My preference would have been to land the plane with the same people we took off with.”

Season three was, by all accounts, a slog. Production started late, then dragged on several months longer than anyone had planned. “It was death by a thousand paper cuts,” says Hunt, who recalls at least one delay for COVID and several more for Sudeikis to catch up on scripts. After filming all day, Sudeikis says he’d regularly work late into the night, doing his final pass on the next day’s script. It wasn’t easy on the actors, who had to get used to learning new lines on the fly, but he had come up at SNL, where all-nighters were customary and grinding until air was the norm.

“It was never me reading something and being like, ‘This is all wrong!’ It was, ‘How do we make it better?’ ” he says. “But, yeah, I’m not a big fan of closing the laptop until the moment.”

No matter how it’s explained, those delays proved costly, as did the increasingly lengthy episodes. A series that ran roughly 30 minutes per episode in season one was suddenly averaging close to an hour, which did it no favors with critics. It all amounted to season three going significantly over budget, according to multiple sources, though Sudeikis takes issue with the characterization. “We were budgeted as a 30-minute show when it became much more,” he argues, noting that there were simply more characters whose stories needed to be sufficiently wrapped up. Still, he takes accountability: “Some people can look at a whiteboard of story ideas and know, ‘That is 22 minutes, that is 37 minutes.’ I haven’t done enough [serialized TV] to do that.”

By the time the third season was over, he was done. He’d told the story that he’d set out to tell, and now he wanted to get back home to the U.S. and think about something else. Anything else. 

***

There were those who simply never accepted that that was it, of course. “I mean, I cried, I experienced the ending of it, but I believed that there was more,” says Goldstein, who was chief among them. “It’s easy to say, ‘Oh, just make new things, make new things, make new things.’ But it’s such a beautiful world that has been built, and it has so many characters and such a richness to it, it’s like, why would you leave?”

Sudeikis ultimately got there, too, though if he was going to do more, he knew he needed not only a new narrative focus but also another boss behind the scenes. “Even just to help communicate things in a timely, clear fashion to the people pushing that money in front of us,” he says, acknowledging his own “left-brain” limitations as he continues: “It’s like growing up, we’d go school-supply shopping every August and I’d buy an assignment notebook — and by the second week of September, I don’t know where those things were.”

Jack Burditt, whose résumé is stuffed with hit sitcoms like 30 Rock and Modern Family, seemed ideally suited, but, as he’d very clearly told his reps, he was done being a showrunner-for-hire. “It’s a terrible job,” he says over lunch in late June. “It’s tough enough when you’ve created the show, but there’s an extra degree of difficulty when it’s like, ‘Well, I didn’t create it, but I have to be the boss of it while also having to honor what this other person created.’ “

He was coming off one such experience, on the then-messy first season of Nobody Wants This, when Sudeikis asked if he’d come by the house. The two had logged time together in New York when Burditt and Sudeikis’ ex-wife, Kay Cannon, were writing on 30 Rock, so he agreed to the meeting. That they’d be running it together made it more palatable, as did the outsize success of the show. Plus, Sudeikis seemed to know that he needed help, and the delineation of duties was largely clear.

“He was like, ‘I need someone to put up the walls, and I’ll hang the art,’ ” says Burditt, who understood that to mean that his job would be to keep the show on budget and on schedule while Sudeikis would continue to be the creative engine and the filter through which every script would run. Burditt agreed to the partnership, which, he says, was a relief to his reps: “My agents were like, ‘You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t do this.’ “

Around the same time, the studio started assembling members of the old cast, some of whom were admittedly nervous to return. “Nervous about not wanting to do it a disservice, this beautiful thing,” says Waddingham, as Temple interjects: “And wondering if you’d be good enough, and if you can remember how to do it.” Then came the new players, the Lady Greyhounds, who had to audition both their acting skills and their soccer ones, just as their male predecessors did years before; they also attended a boot camp before the season officially began.

For Tanya Reynolds, who was cast as the team’s prickly assistant coach and the season’s most substantial new face, soccer know-how was less relevant. Still, she requested a follow-up Zoom with Sudeikis after being hired to make sure that he was acutely aware of her lack of athleticism. “I got really paranoid because the thought of me playing a coach is quite hilarious to anyone who knows me,” she says. “I was like, ‘Listen, man, you’ve not met me, but I’m not this character. I can give it a go, but I’ve never kicked a ball in my life.’ And Jason just was very Ted Lasso about it, like, ‘Well, I think you are.’ “

The first week of production, Burditt says he got an early morning call from Lawrence, whose Doozer Productions was still involved with the show. “He tried to give me a lowdown of what to be prepared for. He says, ‘Here’s how to deal with the show, here’s how to deal with Jason. …’ I think we spoke for about 20 minutes and then he said, ‘We should continue to have these conversations every one or two weeks,’ ” he recounts, then adds: “I have not talked to him since.”

Dealing with Jason, as it were, did take some adjustment, as did working in the U.K., which keeps shorter days, and trying to work around certain talent schedules, the downside of Lasso making stars of its cast. Early on, they started to fall woefully behind schedule again, prompting more than one “come to Jesus”-style Zoom with the studio. But over time, Burditt acclimated to Sudeikis’ process, which mostly required that he be given more time to see and tinker with scripts. And given what Burditt had heard, he was pleasantly surprised by how much of what was written by him and the other writers, nearly all holdovers from the first three seasons, ultimately stayed in. In the end, they came in under budget — fewer soccer scenes helped — and were only a month or so behind schedule. 

“I know he’s got this reputation, and I know he drove Bill insane, but I honestly feel like Jason’s easy,” says Burditt. “At one point, and I don’t even remember where we were or what we were shooting, but I just put an arm around him, and I go, ‘I’m so glad you called me.’ ” 

***

Back at the bar, Sudeikis has been tucked into a booth watching Argentina and Algeria face off in one of the World Cup’s early-round games for a few hours now. It’s quiet enough that TV’s most famous soccer coach hasn’t been swarmed by fans, but not enough so that he hasn’t had to pose for at least a few photos.

A month later, he’ll be on the field for the World Cup final, enmeshed in the sport in ways he never would have imagined when he made that first ad 13 years ago. Sudeikis is now a frequent presence at games — both Premier League and World Cup — and knows many of the top players personally, including Argentina’s star, Lionel Messi, with whom he once shot a commercial for Michelob Ultra. On this evening, Sudeikis has settled for a pair of Bud Lights on draft. He’s said before that Ted Lasso is him “after two beers,” to which he now jokes: “I mean, we’ll see, won’t we?”

Hunt insists that the “two beers” are an unnecessary qualifier, and he isn’t the only one. “Ted Lasso is very much a representative of a part of Jason,” Hunt says of his friend and collaborator, whom he calls “a well-intentioned Midwestern yokel who really gives a shit about other people and who has a knack for seeing stuff that other people don’t quite see.”

Production on season four wrapped in January, but, in mid-June, Sudeikis is still editing away. The early episodes are significantly shorter than anything in season three, though, per Burditt, both Apple and Warner Bros. would likely prefer the whole season be even tighter. “And look, we tried to do that too,” he says.

In a matter of weeks, it will be out of their hands, and the general consensus, internally, is that the fourth season is considerably stronger than the third. “I think it has some of that season one magic,” says Goldstein, echoing a sentiment that’s been shared by others, albeit quietly so as not to jinx it. Still, there will be those who simply won’t be interested in watching a new team — even if doing another season with the old team didn’t make sense creatively, which is what Sudeikis explained to those actors in a series of what he describes as “very difficult” phone calls. (Yes, he called all of them directly: “Because I didn’t want them to hear it on the internet,” he says, “and because I love those guys and we all went through something together.”)

As for the Lady Greyhounds, Wadding-ham and Temple have stepped into an unofficial mentor role. As the female veterans on set, they’ve been trying to prepare the new stars, should their lives change in the same way that their own did six years ago. “I was teasing them, like, ‘Enjoy your anonymity now,’ ” says Waddingham, who adds with a bawdy laugh: “Just wait till you see your face on a great big billboard. Like, you fucking wait!”

If all goes according to plan, the Lasso team will be back in the writers room in late August mapping out a not-yet-ordered season five. There are still ideas that they haven’t used from the Ojai retreat, and Sudeikis’ Notes app remains a well of material. Once again, Sudeikis has a three-season arc in mind, and he’s hopeful that the audience will still be there. “I know I needed this,” he says. “I needed it as much as other people do.” Coach Lasso couldn’t have said it better himself.

This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.