Jason Sudeikis pulled Ted Lasso back from the finish line in early February 2024, gathering the writers in Ojai, California to test whether there was still a fourth season worth making. What had been treated as a done series is now set to return on Aug. 5, with the show shifting to an all-female AFC Richmond team.
That matters now because Ted Lasso was not just another streaming title waiting in the wings. In 2023, it was the year’s most watched streaming original and drew 283 million viewing hours, while also winning 13 Emmys, including two best comedy trophies, and a Peabody. After more than three years without new episodes, the show’s return puts one of Apple TV’s biggest comedies back into circulation.
Sudeikis had pushed for the third season to air as the end a year earlier, and he had said he planned the show with three seasons in his head. But when he brought the writers together, he admitted he was rethinking that certainty, saying, “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s done,’” Brendan Hunt said the group was “checking the viability of the soil,” and the room started feeling out where the story could still grow.
The ideas came quickly once the door was open. Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly had begun working on a concept tied to Roy Kent. Other staffers played with Keeley Jones, while Sudeikis said he was toying with a Leslie Higgins cartoon and a Dani Rojas telenovela. The writers ultimately liked the idea of a women’s soccer team as Coach Lasso’s new purview, which is the direction the fourth season is now taking.
That shift also answers the big question hanging over the comeback: this is not a straight continuation of the old team. The new season will center on AFC Richmond’s all-female squad, while Ted, Rebecca, Keeley and Roy all return. Goldstein said the move made sense only once the show stopped pretending it was a spinoff, calling it closer to “adding a room to the bar” than replacing the bar itself.
For Sudeikis, the decision lands after years in which Ted Lasso had become his full-time project. He had been writing or rewriting every script while starring as the coach and, by season three, was collecting $1 million per episode. He had also gone through a very public split with Olivia Wilde, with whom he has two children, now 12 and 9, making the turn back to the series less like a routine renewal than a deliberate return to the one thing he had not quite finished.
The unanswered piece is narrower now, not bigger: how far the all-female AFC Richmond setup will take the series once Ted Lasso returns on Aug. 5. The writers have chosen the next room in the bar. The rest is whether the show can make that room feel as alive as the first one did.
