Ted Lasso

Ted Lasso season finale, “So Long, Farewell.”

Late in what certainly seems to be the final episode of Ted Lasso, reporter Trent Crimm reads a note Ted has written him regarding Trent’s book about his season with AFC Richmond, which Trent has titled The Lasso Way. “One small suggestion,” Ted writes. “I’d change the title. It’s not about me. It never was.”

The sentiment works as something wholly true to Ted and the philosophy he has espoused over the comedy’s three seasons. And it functions as something of a meta-comment about the viability of the series potentially continuing without its title character. No one involved in the series — not Jason Sudeikis, not Apple, not the studio — has said word one about whether this was meant to be the end of the third season, the end of the series, or the end of the whole Ted Lasso Expanded Cinematic Universe. But the season ends with Ted back in Kansas, happy to be around his son Henry, and to be part of ex-wife Michelle’s life in some way. (We’ll get back to that.) Whether or not Apple tries to pull a Hogan Family/The Conners/Mayberry RFD reinvention featuring all the characters other than Ted, his story feels concluded.

But there’s a third way to look at that note, even if it’s not what the episode’s writers, Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly (who, along with Bill Lawrence, adapted the character from a series of NBC Sports promos in the 2010) may have intended. In arguing for his lack of centrality to the story in the book — which Trent retitles The Richmond Way — Ted is unwittingly acknowledging how irrelevant he had become to Ted Lasso itself.Whatever the motivation, it didn’t work. Without Ted — and, by extension, the team he coached — as an organizing principle, Season Three felt more and more unfocused with each passing week. Big ideas were introduced and then dropped, huge interpersonal moments took place entirely off-camera, and characterization was all over the map. The home stretch of the season felt incredibly rushed, as if Sudeikis and the other producers(*) had run out of time even though most episodes had ballooned to 60-odd minutes. (The finale was 75.)