do you believe in Season 3 of Ted Lasso?

"I promise you there is something worse out there than being sad, and that’s being alone and being sad"

“have you played a lot darts, Ted?”

A sizable part of Ted Lasso’s initial success was probably the luck of its timing. The first season of the Apple+ show appeared in August of 2020 as we were nearly a year into a global pandemic; the vaccine was still months away (and hardly a certainty). The future looked bleak and the relentless optimism of the show’s title character came as a much-needed breath in the stagnant air of quarantine.

When that first season of Ted Lasso appeared, most of us were dreaming of living in a place like March 2023, when Ted Lasso will return for its third and final season.¹ The first two seasons each won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. It seems like everybody has watched the show, but if you haven’t, the basic rundown goes something like this:

a midwestern Division II American football coach named Ted Lasso (who is struggling with his marriage) goes to England to coach professional soccer. At first he is poorly-received and egos flare up, but through the course of the first season, Lasso’s midwestern optimism eventually wins over almost all of his critics. The second season expands upon the other characters and closes with the arrival of an antagonist — Lasso’s former assistant coach.

Anyway, Ted Lasso is enormously popular. And it seems especially popular among people in my demographic — college-educated millennials. The show has a snappy sense of humor that recognizes the effectiveness (and arguably, the ubiquitousness) of dark comedy in the post-Trump era but instead of capitalizing on the literal shitshow that was planet earth in 2020-2021, Ted Lasso turns the other cheek. It’s the other side of the comedy coined in Veep.

Here’s an oft-quoted Season 1 Lasso joke that’s more typical of dark humor:

Ted Lasso: ‘he must be from England, yeah?’

Assistant Coach: ‘Wales.’

Ted Lasso: ‘is that another country?”

Assistant Coach: ‘Yes and no.’

Ted Lasso: ‘how many countries are in this country?"‘

Assistant Coach: ‘four’

Ted Lasso: (shrugs) ‘kind of like America these days’

That should give you some context for the character, but just in case it was ineffective, here’s another one:

Sam (player): ‘is it true in America that you guys have so many beautiful dogs in pounds that some get put down for no reason?’

Ted Lasso: ‘that is true, Sam. But it’s also a thing that a lot of female singer-songwriters are trying to change.’

These aren’t complex jokes and they don’t drive (or really even affect) the show’s plotlines beyond character-shaping. They get a simple laugh by recognizing the bleakness of 21st century America and serve to acknowledge the hill that Lasso’s optimism must climb.

But optimism is Lasso’s defining trait — one which infects the rest of the show. And this optimism is particularly powerful because Ted Lasso has few reasons to be optimistic. His wife has left him, he’s in a strange country² (where he’s received as if he himself were the coronavirus) and the odds of success are far, far from optimistic.

That pessimistic reality is precisely why we’re so affected by Ted’s inability to live placidly in the world that he’s been given but instead to reach for and rely upon an unnatural optimism. It reminds you a bit of Hamlet's speech and a bit of that Camus quote, “in the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me, there lay an invincible summer.”³

Through he first two seasons, Lasso’s optimism is built into the show in a number of ways, but it’s built most powerfully through monologues. The best (or maybe, most glowing?) is probably the dart scene. But the most naked example of Lasso’s unbridled optimism⁴ comes in this pre-game monologue.⁵

So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. It's the hope that kills you — ya’ll know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief …

Believe has become the tag-line of the show. This is illustrated by what must be the cheapest prop in show-business — an off-centered sign hanging above Lasso’s office that reads simply: BELIEVE. The Season 3 teaser was a one-minute-long clip of each of the show’s characters making their own personalized BELIEVE signs.

But the question now — the question at the back everyone’s minds for the past several months is do you believe in season 3 of Ted Lasso? And now is the time to decide. Because season 3 premiers on March 15th.

The writers have long said that Season 3 will be the final season of the show. And that bodes well for our collective believing. Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned from television shows (and the recent life trajectory of Tom Brady), it’s that a performance is strongest when it knows when to walk away. Even if the third season of Ted Lasso falls short of the sky-high expectations that are set up for it, we can still fall back on the first two seasons.

And everybody seems to be feeling the pressure of this upcoming season. According to the trades, they’ve been rewriting this thing constantly. It took them nearly two years to put together a twelve-episode show. Jason Sudeikis — who in his role as creator and title character of the most popular show on television — is clearly feeling the pressure.⁶ And he has big ideas for the show. During Ted Lasso’s latest Emmy acceptance speech, Sudeikis said, “this show is about good and evil, the truth and lies. But it’s mostly about our response to those things.”

And yeah, that’s a hell of a thing to say about a television show. But fuck it, I believe in season 3 of Ted Lasso. I believe that it’ll live up to our expectations — that season 3 will have the magic that has made the show a cultural phenomenon. I believe because I can’t not. Because that’s what this show is all about. When I sit down to watch that first episode of the show, I’m going to go in with all the hope I’ve got left. And I think we all should. I think we owe them that. Because this isn’t 2020 anymore and dammit, we should really be able to have nice things again.

post-script/copyright ass-covering: I mean this scene. come on. [melting face emoji]⁷

1. Alright, yeah, March 2023 isn’t a lovely place on all accounts. On many accounts, it sucks. But at least we’re not all in hiding from a never-ending pandemic.

2. I doubt I’m the only one who draws this similarity but Ted Lasso reminds me a bit of Henry James’ The American. They’re both about an American who goes to Europe (a notion with which Henry James was obsessed) but in James’ book, the American is brash and more emblematic of the manifest destiny ideology. And he’s unsuccessful, sometimes annoyingly so. The book ends with his would-be fiancé going into a convent (another fate which Henry James couldn’t stop writing about). His Americanism does little to break through the European coldness (except for this black sheep brother-type named Valentin who was always going to be receptive to him). But, in contrast, Ted Lasso’s optimism is enormously effective at breaking through the chilly British personalities.

3. this is one of those quotes that always bothers me when I see it on t-shirts because it seems so powerful when ripped of context but in-context, it’s so much more stunning. The quote comes from an essay titled ‘Return to Tipassa’ and the piece is loaded with an emotional weight that has always blown me away. It’s from Camus’ later stage (he had three stages of works) and Tipassa is a town in Algeria where he grew up that affected his writing tremendously. When he was younger, he wrote this essay titled ‘Nuptials at Tipassa’ that, my god, it’s one of those pieces that’s so beautiful, it physically exhausts you after you read it.

4. a commonality among all pieces about Ted Lasso is the bending-over-backwards attempt to by the writer to figure out how many adjectives they can use to describe Lasso’s optimism. The New Yorker used unabating and radical. In this piece, I’m shooting for a dozen.

5. I don’t want to go too deep into a critical look at the show so I’ll relegate to this footnote the observation that Ted Lasso (when it’s working, and it usually is) has incredible pacing. It’s built in an astoundingly intricate way and the “believe in believe” speech is the sort of optimism-climax that has been subtlety building for the previous two episodes. And that is what makes it effective. Because Lasso’s optimism doesn’t come in waves, it comes in carefully directed rivers. You always know it’s there but the show (usually) only hits you over the head with it at the precise moment when it will be the most effective.

6. Sudeikis’ personal life has also been dragged pretty roughly into the public eye over the course of time that he’s making this show. Which sucks.

7. oh, also, I wrote about Ted Lasso’s love of books a few years ago for LitHub — here’s that piece