This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Dig that AFC Richmond jersey out of the closet. Pony up again for that Apple TV+ subscription. Yes, Ted Lasso is back. Three years after hanging up the whistle and tugging what seemed like its last heartstring, the feel-good sitcom sensation—a fish-out-of-water comedy about an eternally optimistic American coach trading one kind of football for another—returns to the small screen. Premiering August 5th, the belated fourth season drags indefatigably upbeat Ted (Jason Sudeikis) back across the pond, this time to lead a newly formed women’s team under the Richmond banner.
As comebacks go, it’s not exactly improbable. Ted Lasso remains one of the most widely watched series of the last decade, a true juggernaut of popularity—and TV executives are not in the business of leaving money on the table or fans wanting more. While the show feinted toward a farewell at the end of Season 3 with a string of happily-ever-afters, there was good reason to doubt the finality of that finale. For one thing, no one involved in the series seemed willing to definitively rule out another season in interviews. They left the door pointedly open—or the “Believe” sign hanging over it.
Looked at one way, it makes perfect sense to bring Lasso back now. Returning on the heels of the World Cup, the show could simultaneously capitalize on soccer fever and feed a guilt-free version of the same for those wary of supporting an organization that handed a peace prize to a warmonger. More than that, Ted Lasso is reblossoming at a cultural moment as dark as the one from which it originally sprouted. The series has always felt like comfort food, serving good vibes (and unfashionable values like kindness and optimism) to an audience starved for them. There’s no reason to think that the world’s appetite for crowd-pleasing counterprogramming has waned since Lasso took its temporary leave in 2023.
It’s hard to watch any season of Ted Lasso and not find yourself questioning the rose-colored logic of his thinking.
What may have changed, however, is the resonance of the show’s worldview—the sense that Ted, patron saint of locker-room mentors, still speaks a gospel worth following. Six years ago, even those who gagged through the hugging and learning of this cheery weekly sports comedy could see its anachronistically uplifting appeal. But at what point does a show go from having its finger planted firmly on the pulse of now to suddenly looking more out of touch than anything else? Put another way: We may have reached the moment when Ted Lasso’s brand of turn-the-other-cheek humanism is no longer enough.
IN THE SUMMER OF 2020, everyone needed a pick-me-up. Ted Lasso obliged. The show, like its namesake hero, benefited from very low expectations: Who was predicting that a sitcom spun off from a series of NBC Sports commercials would actually turn out good? Lasso’s stroke of genius was to make the title character more than the mere clueless good-ol’-boy caricature Sudeikis played in those admittedly inspired ads. On Apple TV, he became a touchingly unflappable idealist, a stranger in a strange land whose paternal decency eclipsed his basic lack of qualifications. He was easy to love, and so was the show. It was a welcome, weekly gust of warmth—a bear hug through the TV screen—after a lonely few months of pandemic life.
Of course, Lasso also landed in our living rooms like a much-needed foil to the sheer ugliness of 2020 in general and of Donald Trump’s increasingly destructive American reign specifically. In extolling such out-of-vogue virtues as friendliness, compassion, and acceptance of others, it offered a kind of antidote to what was polluting the air every bit as much as COVID that summer. To watch the show was to entertain a more utopian vision of the world—an alternate reality of non-toxic masculinity, proud diversity, and competition without cruelty. It said we could all be better versions of ourselves.
There was precedent for Lasso’s brand of anti-doomscroll. In many ways, the show’s creators—Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly—were moving a ball set in motion by Michael Schur, mastermind of endlessly likable workplace sitcoms like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the ultimate Obama-era prime-time heart-warmer, Parks and Recreation. Lasso also arrived as the crest of the so-called Nicecore wave—that is, a movement of films and TV shows that served, in their sweetly supportive philosophy, as a rebuttal to Trump’s corrosive influence on America. Things had gotten so bad, culturally, that people were mistaking a cute family film about a marmalade-loving bear for the height of humanistic profundity. Ted Lasso profited from the same hunger for benevolence.
It’s not a stretch to see the show, and the character himself, as a response to Trumpism. Sudeikis has said as much, referencing the future president’s infamous 2015 escalator ride into Republican politics (and the racist scapegoating that would define his presidency) as a key motivation for making Ted over into a tireless champion of empathy. In many respects, Ted Lasso is a liberal fantasy, the ultimate Purple State American: a drawling Midwest football coach who harbors no prejudices and is deeply in touch with his emotions. The only negative stereotype Ted grazes is a certain American incuriosity: After three seasons, he still hasn’t taken the time to learn very much about the game of soccer! All the same, he’s plainly a walking rebuke to MAGA, an anti-Trump figure to his squishy core.
The arc of Lasso’s first season, whose irresistibility the show never managed to replicate, is almost evangelical. Slowly but surely, Ted wins everyone over. The cynical sportswriter, the embittered veteran player, the arrogant hotshot rookie, the vindictive team owner who’s only hired Ted to destroy her ex-husband’s beloved franchise: All treat Lasso like a joke until they inevitably come around to his radical kindness, his Mister Rogers–like belief in the essential goodness of people. Was there a liberal fantasy in that too? Ted Lasso seemed to tap into a deep desire to see the other side as persuasible—to believe that it’s possible to appeal to everyone’s better angels.
For a show that rarely explicitly broached politics, it spoke quite clearly to its exact political moment. Serendipity helped. Ted Lasso premiered, after all, just three days before the 2020 Democratic National Convention, and wrapped up one month before the election that would see Trump ousted, however temporarily, from his perch in the Oval Office. Lasso, the show and the character, seemed eerily in sync with a campaign that presented the Democrats as a moral alternative to Trump’s ruinous four years in office. Hell, wasn’t there a certain kinship of image between Ted and the former, soon-to-be-promoted vice president? Joe Biden defined himself on the trail as a folksy voice of decency. And like Lasso, he was a man humanized by family tragedy and his love for his son.
You might even call Ted Lasso the last essential pop-culture artifact of the first Trump administration. Or was it the first of the short-lived Biden era, itself a last gasp of the Obama years and the optimistic entertainments those inspired? Lasso’s bright, satisfying first season sat at the crossroads, a transitional phenomenon that reflected a public desire, even a desperation, to turn the page. It’s tough to extricate the show’s success from those three fateful months when it felt possible to, yes, believe in pushing back the tide of Trumpism with a single vital election. Ted Lasso was the crowd-pleaser of that proverbial homestretch, that final crawl to the polls. And as with a lot of entertainments intrinsically tied to their moment in time, it wasn’t necessarily built for the world that came after.
YOU COULD ARGUE THAT Ted Lasso’s moment passed even before it came to its ultimately inconclusive conclusion three years ago. Not in terms of viewership: If anything, the show grew more popular by the season. But there was no recapturing the precise alchemy of that first run of episodes, a stellar season of TV powered by a cultural vibe shift—a burst of mass hopium—bigger than just the story of one underdog soccer team trying to stay in its division.
There’s plenty to admire about Season 2 of Ted Lasso. For all its flaws, it was genuinely after more than a victory lap, or simply continuing to raise the spirits of its rapidly expanding fandom. In fact, there are times when this second set of episodes almost feels like a hangover after the sugar rush of the first. The show reflected the struggle to hold onto hearts and minds after you’ve won them—a challenge reflected both through the on-screen conflicts it followed and the off-screen criticisms this critical darling provoked.
Ted himself became more complicated, maybe a touch less saintly. His struggle with panic attacks—a season-long arc that snaked its way back to a defining trauma from the character’s past—revealed reservoirs of hurt behind that famous Lasso charm. (Here again, art seemed to anticipate life, however imperfectly: While this fictional American leader labored to conceal his sporadically paralyzing anxiety from the press, so did our real, newly minted American leader wrestle with health issues just beyond the public eye.) And Ted’s initial reluctance to consider therapy puts an interesting kink in the armor of a man who had, up to this point, been presented as a paradigm of enlightened American masculinity.
More compelling still was the heel turn of former Richmond kit man Nathan “Nate” Shelley (Nick Mohammed), an adorkable sidekick who sours into a petty, insecure villain after Ted promotes him to assistant coach. This was Ted Lasso complicating the feel-good arc of its previous season by saying that sometimes our faith in other people can be misplaced. At the same time, the show flirts with seeing some logic in Nate’s lament that Ted lifted him up and then immediately turned his attention elsewhere. Is there a fickleness to his emotional investment? It was intriguing to see Ted Lasso poke at the values of its protagonist and even question an ideology it had spent its inaugural stretch joyfully foisting upon other characters.
This thornier version of the show didn’t last. Season 3 of Ted Lasso really is a victory lap—baggier, sappier, more self-indulgent in the rom-com soapiness it embraces in the homestretch. Facing a potential ending, the show doubled down on crowd-pleasing without much in the way of leavening conflict. Worse, it seemed to settle for simply lionizing Ted. He is, in that last year, vindicated in his virtuousness: Nate comes crawling back, in the once-final episode of the series, with his hat in his hand, accepting his old job as kit man again as self-flagellating penance for ever doubting the boss and his relentless positivity. Turns out Ted was right all along. The show was more interesting, though, when it dared to wonder.
THESE DAYS, IT’S HARD to watch any season of Ted Lasso and not find yourself questioning the rose-colored logic of his thinking. What was refreshing in 2020—a celebration of almost Christlike magnanimity, even in the face of scoundrels—seems insufficient, even naïve when applied to the enormity of 2026. Even for a fairy tale, Ted Lasso requires an almost pathological suspension of cynicism. In a post-pandemic, post-DOGE world, is it even possible to entertain Ted’s belief that there’s good to be found in everyone? That’s an idea that seems less hopeful than downright delusional today.
To be clear, the qualities that have made Ted Lasso an inspiring character—his bottomless capacity to care about others, his glass-half-full hopefulness, his unflagging good humor—still have a place in the social and political reality of today. Indeed, all of the above have been on full and moving display during the ongoing anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, for example. The point is that Ted, in his downright superhuman niceness, feels like yesterday’s role model—the living embodiment of “They go low, we go high.” His moral compass is beyond reproach. His aw-shucks civility is not.
In 2026, we need more than nice. Believers alone won’t cut it either. We need fighters, too. We need incivility. We need dissent. We need “Shut up you ugly fuck.” We need the uncut outrage ordinary people are bringing to the streets. We need something closer to the take-no-shit saltiness of Ted’s first convert, the glowering bastard with the heart of gold, Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). None of this describes Ted Lasso, a character whose stubborn amiability and love-thine-enemy conviction were refreshing at first. Now they bring to mind a political party too polite to take the gloves off.
A TV show, of course, has no responsibility to meet the moment. It can just be escapism. Comfort-watch pleasantness is a luxury it’s allowed, because you shouldn’t seek your fighting spirit from a breezy half-hour sitcom about a soccer team. But for Ted Lasso to resonate the way it did in 2020, it would need to reflect more than the burning desire for a little goodness so many of us felt in those dog days. It would need to connect to the spirit of right now. In other words, it would need to get in touch with its anger.
At least once, Ted Lasso did. There’s a great scene in the first season where Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) takes Ted to task for choosing a player’s feelings over winning a crucial match. “Losing has repercussions,” he seethes, stressing that it’s actually pretty selfish to pretend that the stakes aren’t high and that Ted’s values matter more than the game. It’s a savvy bit of character interrogation on the show’s part, and the kind of prickly encounter Ted Lasso could stand to include more often. It also pinpoints the limitations of Ted’s (and, by extension, the show’s) general worldview. Kindness is a virtue in this mean-spirited age, but it’s still not everything.
As if to raise the matter one more time on its way out the door, the third season of Ted Lasso ended with “Fight Test,” a song all about the folly of playing it perpetually cool instead of finding the gumption to stand up and speak out for what’s right. Who knows, maybe the forthcoming fourth season of the show will take that needle drop as direction and introduce a Ted Lasso with a little more fire in his belly and fight in his heart. (As of this writing, none of the episodes are available.) If not, there’s another Apple TV+ series that should do the trick. It’s called Pluribus and it stars Rhea Seehorn as one of the last defenders of humanity, fighting back an alien invasion one venomous insult at a time. Nice is not in Carol Sturka’s emotional vocabulary. She wouldn’t know how to turn the other cheek if she wanted to.
This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
