It may be time to admit something to ourselves and to each other: Season four of Ted Lasso is a bit of a dog’s dinner.
The hit show’s return, after a tidy wrap-up to three sweet seasons, promised a new team and — one hoped — a fresh wave of storylines for its sprawling cast of women footballers, team leaders and idiosyncratic coaches. Instead, it’s brought in a cast of still-underdeveloped supporting characters, subbed in caricature analogs (you’re a legend, but I’m looking at you, Tracey Ullman) of the fleshed-out characters from the original three-season arc, and stitched together a suite of plot threads riddled with tired sitcom tropes.
Case in point: the Roy-Keeley-Erin love triangle, the No. 1 offender in episode six — a kind of bottle episode that gathers most of the show’s characters in one glammed-up location to ring in New Year’s Eve aboard Zelda’s boat. Ahead of that, Roy winds up hospitalized (again) after a jump-around to House of Pain’s “Jump Around” with his old frenemy and teammate Jamie Tartt ends in injury. Then, in a twist pulled from a dozen other sitcoms and dramas, eavesdropping Keeley overhears the wrong part of his profession of love, walking away just before a drugged-up Roy can finish the sentence with “Keeley” instead of Erin’s name.
It’s a lazy trope we’ve seen so many times before, and unfortunately it isn’t the only one in this episode, which has Rebecca pining for Matthijs only to end up in a heart-to-heart with none other than Tartt, now shilling his Old Testament-themed hooch. There’s a brief will-they-won’t-they that’s impossible to care about, since Rebecca and Jamie ending up romantically entangled would make little sense and likely cause a fan revolt. So it amounts to a “what if” fantasy that almost sees the two kiss at midnight (such high stakes, right?).
The Lady Greyhounds, gathered and glammed for the night, finally had a chance to reveal more of their lives, and the writers teed up an opportunity to create new plotlines that could propel the season forward. As with the episodes so far, though, we’ve been handed only snippets and small gags to define these women — here, swings at humor and character development (Lizzie sneaking ham from the buffet, Alice discovering the team doesn’t hate her after all) pale next to what the show did with the rich, perfectly sentimental storytelling around the men’s team in its first three seasons.
So we have a series that sets out to confront the inequity between men’s and women’s sports and falls directly into the same trap — leaving its women underdeveloped and lacking support. It’s a shame but the series still has time to fix it — but it had better come fast: Season four is fading, and it won’t be a memorable return for Mr. Lasso if it doesn’t turn things around soon.
Speaking of our titular hero: he spends the episode away from his team, down at the pub with his ex on New Year’s Eve, talking through their history. Some revelations about Michelle and her therapist follow, and she eventually nudges him to join the team to ring in the New Year. Then comes the reveal of who kisses whom as the clock strikes 12 — but for many of us, at that point, it was time to kiss this episode goodnight.
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