Ted Lasso was given extra time

The third and final season of Ted Lasso has started on Apple TV+ streaming. The show about an American coach who came to Britain to train an English Premier League club won over the American Television Academy, which has already awarded him eight Emmy awards, and most importantly, viewers around the world. Getting ready to say goodbye Yulia Shagelman.

The third season of Theda Lasso opens with an existential question. “Why am I still here?” the title character (Jason Sudeikis) asks himself. Two years ago, a charming, mustachioed American football coach from Kansas jumped at the opportunity to move to England and coach a regular football team, knowing nothing about this sport, because it allowed him to escape from personal problems – a falling apart family and a wife who filed for divorce ( Andrea Anders). The owner of the Richmond club, Rebecca (Rebecca Welton), who hired him, was also of little interest in goals and offsides: her goal was, with the help of Ted’s incompetence, to ruin the team she inherited from her ex-husband, scoundrel and traitor Rupert (Anthony Head).

Needless to say, everything went in a completely different scenario? Ted’s humanity and openness helped him to connect with the players and turn a crowd of fragile male egos into a real team, not only on the field, but also off it. Rebecca revised her priorities and began to sincerely root for Richmond. Along the way, almost everyone who had a chance to encounter Ted took a fresh look at the sport, grew as a person and began to solve psychological problems that they might not have even suspected they had. True, by the end of the first season, Richmond flew out of the Premier League, but by this time Ted had already managed to convince both the players and the audience that the main thing was not victory, but participation, and no matter how trite it sounded, the authors of the series really presented us this and many other common truths are so sincere and at the same time talented and witty that it was impossible not to agree with them.

The second season was dedicated to the return of the team to the Premier League, as well as the career rise and at the same time the personal fall of a man in whom no one would have suspected an antagonist before – Tedov’s protégé Nate (Nick Mohammed). He was cleaning at Richmond, being ridiculed and insulted by the players, but Ted saw in him a talented football strategist and promoted him to his assistant. Perhaps the most daring move of the authors, which runs counter to the concept of a “good show”, was to show how a “little man”, rising from rags to riches, does not become a noble prince who forgives his offenders, but begins to take revenge on the whole world and, above all, on those who who was kind to him, for past humiliations.

As a result, Ted and Nate meet the new football year as full-fledged rivals, and in the views of the latter – even enemies. After all, Nate became the coach of West Ham, Rupert’s new club, and the confrontation between the two teams is one of the main intrigues of the season. Rebecca, mindless, longs to defeat her ex-husband, Richmond players continue to lead a busy personal life, new bright characters appear at the club, and Ted wonders if he has already begun to abuse British hospitality.

From the very beginning, when Ted Lasso first hit the airwaves in pandemic 2020, restoring audience optimism and becoming a hit, its creators Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, and Brendan Hunt (who also plays Ted’s best friend, trainer Beard) warned they were up to three seasons, no more, no less. In today’s television, writers rarely get the chance to end shows on their own terms: they’re either abruptly canceled due to bad ratings, or dragged on forever for good ones, to the point where viewer interest in the characters and story finally dries up, or even turns into annoyance. . The path of “Ted Lasso”, despite all the successes, cannot be called completely cloudless: if the first season turned out to be surprisingly solid, then in the longer second season there were already extra episodes and not the most successful storylines. Will it be possible in the last twelve episodes to make ends meet and complete the story so that the audience does not breathe a sigh of relief, but wants more, but at the same time understands that the point has been put in the right place? So far, the season has not started well for Richmond, and all football experts predict another defeat for him. But not for nothing that the main slogan of Ted from his first days in the team was the word “believe.”