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Apple’s major hit show “Ted Lasso” centered its return on women’s soccer and nearly every grievance progressive critics prioritize. They still said it failed women.
It should serve as a reminder to Hollywood that trying to please people who are never satisfied is a losing battle. And Hollywood really should stop ruining good shows trying to chase that approval.
Now, I loved the first two seasons of “Ted Lasso.” The third season wasn’t as good, but I watched the entire thing.
So, when Apple brought the show back after a three-year hiatus, I was willing to give Season 4 a chance.
I didn’t make it through the premiere.
During the opening sequence, Ted is working at a Kansas City grocery store and casually stealing food from his employer. When a coworker asks whether he worries about getting caught, Ted says he doesn’t, “probably due to my deeply ingrained white male privilege.”
It was a throwaway joke that arrived almost immediately, before the show established its new story or gave viewers much of a reason to care. It felt deliberate, like the writers were telling the audience exactly what kind of season this would be.
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Then came the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum scene.
Leslie Higgins visits the museum after discovering that the American Jazz Museum is closed for a private event. A tour guide explains how Black baseball players, including Satchel Paige, were denied opportunities in Major League Baseball because of segregation.
Higgins responds by comparing their experience to women once being prohibited from playing soccer in England.
Using the color barrier in American baseball as a narrative bridge to the challenges facing a fictional English women’s soccer team felt painfully forced and over-the-top.
My wife rolled her eyes. I looked at her and asked whether there was any reason to keep watching.
She agreed there wasn’t.
So, we turned it off.
I couldn’t stomach watching the remaining episodes, but I did review the transcripts of all seven that Apple has released as of Sept. 17. I paid particularly close attention to the first four episodes, which were among those provided to television critics before the season premiered.
Those transcripts confirmed exactly what the opening episode suggested: Gender politics aren’t a minor component of the new season.
They are the season.
‘Ted Lasso’ made its priorities clear from the beginning
The second episode revolves heavily around whether Rebecca is sufficiently feminist after hiring Ted to coach AFC Richmond’s new women’s team.
Alice Chilton, who helped construct the team, tells Rebecca she is resigning after being passed over for the head-coaching position. Before leaving, Alice asks Rebecca whether she considered her for the job.
Rebecca says no.
Alice then asks whether Rebecca considered any woman.
Again, Rebecca says no.
This sends Rebecca into a panic over whether she is supportive enough of women. She begins reading feminist literature and delivers a painfully awkward press-conference speech declaring that women are “just as capable and compelling as men” and that “the future is female.”
She then introduces the manager of Richmond’s women’s team, “who just happens to be a man.”
The show plays Rebecca’s desperation for laughs. But the underlying conflict is whether Ted, as a man, should have received the opportunity at all.
Remember what Ted accomplished with Richmond. He took the club through relegation, earned promotion back to the Premier League and then led it to second place after entering the final day of the season with a chance to win the championship.
Ted was overqualified to coach a brand-new second-division women’s team. Yet the show treats Rebecca’s decision to hire him as evidence that she might have failed women.
The first four episodes introduce several predictable progressive talking points surrounding supposed oppression of women in sports: lower salaries, inferior facilities, inadequate media coverage and a lack of financial support. One might argue that those are products of capitalism and not some nefarious plot to hold down female athletes, but I digress.
Then comes a cascade of storylines centered on female athletes, as if the writers had a checklist and had to make sure they hit them all. One player leaves the team after becoming pregnant. A single mother brings her child to open tryouts because she couldn’t arrange childcare. Sponsors threaten to abandon the team, while male shareholders mock the entire idea as a waste of money.
Then Zelda Southport, a wealthy investor in women’s sports, delivers a speech accusing executives of using women’s soccer for “reputation-laundering” while hiding their “fake allyship.” She invokes the “patriarchy” for good measure.
Again, the writers aren’t trying to hide their political messaging. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The political messaging is the entire plot.
The promotional campaign made the target audience equally clear
On Aug. 5, the day Season 4 premiered, “Ted Lasso” co-creator Brendan Hunt appeared on Sarah Spain’s podcast. Spain is a radical left-wing activist who has referred to Vice President J.D. Vance as a “demon” and launched a disgusting personal smear of Sophie Cunningham for having the temerity to argue against “biological men” in women’s sports.
Hunt chose Spain’s show to help promote the new season, which felt like a very intentional promotional choice.
The following night, Jason Sudeikis, Hunt, Juno Temple and several members of the new cast appeared at an exclusive “Ted Lasso” event at the Paley Museum. Megan Rapinoe, another radical far-left-wing activist, served as the moderator.
The people behind “Ted Lasso” knew whose approval they wanted and went directly to Sarah Spain and Megan Rapinoe to seek it.
The interview with Hunt also made clear how central the women’s team was to the show’s return. He said Sudeikis kept thinking about doing the series with a women’s team after Season 3. That idea led to a small writers’ retreat intended to determine whether the show remained “fertile ground.”
The writers decided it did.
In other words, women’s soccer wasn’t simply the setting selected after the decision to revive “Ted Lasso.” It was the idea that convinced the creators to revive it.
Apple celebrated the premiere, but what happened afterward?
Despite my reaction, plenty of people watched the Season 4 premiere.
According to Nielsen data provided by Apple, the episode generated 296.6 million viewing minutes in the United States across Aug. 4 and Aug. 5. More than 200 million minutes came on Aug. 5 alone, making “Ted Lasso” the most-streamed program in the country that day.
Apple called it the biggest launch in Apple TV history.
That’s impressive, but it also isn’t terribly surprising.
“Ted Lasso” was one of the most popular streaming shows in America during its original run. It won 13 Emmy Awards, became Apple’s signature television series and disappeared for three years after what many viewers believed was its finale.
Of course people wanted to see it return.
Nielsen’s first weekly report was also strong. “Ted Lasso” generated 866 million viewing minutes across 35 available episodes, including the first three seasons, during the week of Aug. 3 through Aug. 9. The Season 4 premiere accounted for 36% of that total, and the show ranked second among streaming originals.
But those figures establish only that people were interested in the return of “Ted Lasso.” They don’t tell us whether the audience stuck around as the season progressed.
OutKick/Fox News Digital reached out to Apple and asked for episode-by-episode viewing totals for the subsequent Season 4 episodes. We also asked whether the company had internal data showing how many viewers who started the premiere finished it and continued watching the season.
Apple did not respond.
The company eagerly supplied the figure that allowed it to announce the biggest premiere in the history of its streaming service. It became much less communicative when asked for the numbers that would show whether those viewers kept watching.
If the later episodes were setting similarly historic marks, it is reasonable to think Apple would be just as eager to publicize those numbers.
Instead, the company that celebrated the premiere hasn’t released any viewing data on the show in over a month.
While that doesn’t prove viewership collapsed after the premiere, there is no public evidence that the record-setting launch translated into equally historic retention.
Progressive critics still thought the show failed women
TIME critic Judy Berman received the first four episodes of Season 4 for review. So, she saw Ted invoke his “white male privilege,” Rebecca admit that she never considered a woman for the coaching job, Alice confront her over that decision, players struggle with pregnancy and childcare, sponsors abandon the women’s team and wealthy investors get lectured about the patriarchy and their “fake allyship.”
The show couldn’t have worked harder to establish its progressive credentials.
Despite all of that, Berman’s headline read: “Ted Lasso Doesn’t Know What to Do With Women’s Soccer.”
Berman argued that Ted’s presence could come across as “paternalistic” and said the character sometimes resembled a “cringey, try-hard male feminist.” She complained that Rebecca and Keeley still felt filtered through the “male gaze” and noted that many qualified female coaches could have received Ted’s job.
“A different coach is going to have to inspire those locker rooms, because Ted Lasso just doesn’t belong,” she concluded.
You know, for a group of people who constantly complain that men think women “don’t belong” in sports, they sure don’t seem to have a problem proclaiming that men don’t belong in women’s sports. Well, except the men who “identify” as women, of course. Those men are to be celebrated.
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Variety critic Alison Herman wrote that “feminist commentary was never the series’ strong suit” and argued that despite the show’s pivot toward women, longtime male characters like Ted, Beard and Roy remain “load-bearing” and “space-occupying” protagonists.
The Times of London critic Carol Midgley criticized the decision to sideline Alice in favor of Ted and argued that other storylines played into gender stereotypes, concluding that “occasionally you could argue the show itself is sexist.”
Apparently, building the season around women’s sports, sexism, representation, unequal funding and male privilege wasn’t enough.
Even one of the people enlisted to celebrate the season found another way the show elevated a man at women’s expense.
At the end of Spain’s interview with Hunt, she recounted a conversation in which Malala Yousafzai argued that the series should really be called “Rebecca.” Her reasoning was that Ted’s compassionate coaching style is possible only because Rebecca, as the club’s owner, permits it. Spain said Malala believed a male owner would have fired Ted and hired a more traditionally masculine manager.
Spain later asked Sudeikis what he thought of Malala’s argument.
“They’re not changing the name,” he replied, according to Spain.
Hunt was far more accommodating. Spain quoted him calling Malala “incredible” and saying, “Everything she says makes sense,” before joking that Warner Bros. probably didn’t want to relabel all the merchandise.
Think about the moving target here. “Ted Lasso” resurrected itself around a women’s team, filled its opening episodes with feminist grievances, pushed its title character toward the sidelines and promoted the season alongside Sarah Spain and Megan Rapinoe.
The response was still that the woman wasn’t receiving enough credit and perhaps the man’s name should be removed from the title.
As of this writing, Season 4 holds an 88% critics score and a 69% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Based on those numbers, critics generally approved of the season’s direction more than the audience did, yet prominent progressive reviewers still found new ideological shortcomings to condemn.
What was “Ted Lasso” supposed to do?
Hollywood keeps chasing approval it can never earn
Hollywood studios repeatedly bend popular franchises around the demands of progressive critics. Writers center the “correct” political issues, diversify the cast, elevate female characters and turn familiar stories into vehicles for approved social messages.
The audience gets a less entertaining product and critics still aren’t satisfied. So, what’s the point?
You see, for the left-wing media, satisfaction would undermine the entire industry. A critic whose influence comes from identifying perceived sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and whatever other “isms” and “phobias” they will invent in the next few years has little incentive to declare that a mainstream television show handled everything correctly.
The standard changes because the criticism is the product.
Hollywood keeps playing along, presumably because executives want favorable coverage, awards and protection from the online backlash that comes with refusing to follow the approved script.
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Yet “Ted Lasso” demonstrates how little that protection is worth.
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The show’s creators resurrected a beloved series and rebuilt it around the issues progressive television critics claim to care about most. They then took it directly to sympathetic figures in left-wing sports media for promotion.
The progressive critics still weren’t happy.
At some point, Hollywood might consider making shows for the people watching them instead of people professionally committed to manufacturing grievances on behalf of whichever “marginalized group” the show has supposedly wronged.
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