"Ted Lasso," Year Three

Mild spoilers ahead.  

It was a slog to get to the end of "Ted Lasso" this year.  Episode lengths ballooned, and a few installments were over an hour in length.  A lot of time was devoted to characters who spend most of their time apart from the Richmond team - notably Keeley and Nate - so we saw less of the all-important ensemble.  Keeley spends most of this year trying to keep her new PR firm afloat, and juggling relationships with her major backer, Jack (Jodi Balfour), an old friend, Shandy (Ambreen Razia), and a stern CFO, Barbara (Katy Wix).  Nate, meanwhile, suffers a crisis of conscience as the head coach of West Ham, and falls for Jade (Edyta Budnik), a hostess at his favorite restaurant.   The only real new presence at Richmond is a attention-seeking new star player named Zava (Maximilian Osinski), though we get more time with minor characters like Colin (Billy Harris), Zoreaux (Moe Jeudy-Lamour), and Trent Crimm (James Lance), who gets permission to shadow and write a book about the team.

It really doesn't feel like Ted gets his head on straight, and the show properly gets underway until the second half of the season.  Once it finds its groove, however, the pace picks up, and the show reaches a satisfying ending.  And that's the best outcome for "Ted Lasso," which probably could have gone on for several more seasons, but chose to leave us on a high note.  It was already seeing a major plateau in quality, and many of the characters really don't work as well in a vacuum.  I love Keeley, and Barbara turns out to be an enjoyable weirdo, but Keeley with Jack is dull as rocks, and Keeley with Shandy seems to result in steep IQ drops.  Nate is even worse.  Redeeming him is fine, but the pacing and emphasis is all wrong.  We spend too much time watching Nate being miserable and awkwardly courting Jade, and not enough on him making up for all the nastiness he put everyone through last season.  Most of the major reconciliations happen offscreen, which feels far too easy.

On the other hand, I loved the Rebecca storylines this year, where she finally lets go of her hatred for Rupert, and starts taking steps toward a next chapter for herself.  And Jamie and Roy's friendship goes through some interesting twists and turns, including a brief revival of their rivalry that ends exactly the way that it should.  I'm glad that Sam got another spotlight episode, and Colin's coming out storyline wasn't dragged out, and there was a musical number in the finale.  The one character who felt absent for too much of the season, however, was Ted.  Frankly, he barely has anything interesting to do for the first six episodes.  And because we don't see much of Ted, we don't see much of Beard or Leslie either, which is a shame.  While I appreciate that Ted's mental health troubles were handled pretty realistically, and weren't just something he could get over quickly, they ate up so much time and were such a downer, I don't think the show ever fully recovered.      

 

I wish I could say that the smarter, healthier Ted at the end of the third season was worth the wait, but in the end I wasn't watching the show for Ted anymore, the way I had been at the beginning.  He was honestly about the eighth or ninth most entertaining character by the finale, and if the show wants to continue without him, I'd be onboard.  I think the writers knew it too, because easily the best thing about the final few episodes was the careful inclusion or callback to just about every character we'd gotten to know and love over the course of the show - including Dr. Sharon, Sassy, Mae, the pub trio,   and even Michelle and Henry watching the final match from the U.S.  And thank goodness there was more football this year, to help carry the season through some of the rougher spots. 

There are some great moments in the third season, but I completely understand why many viewers chose not to finish it, or came away disappointed.   "Ted Lasso" had a perfect first year and the subsequent ones couldn't live up to it.   I found the quality never dipped to the point of being unacceptable, but I'm glad they chose to end the series when they did.  

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