Ted Lasso Season 4 Isn’t Too Positive — Ted Is Hurting

Spoilers through Ted Lasso Season 4, Episode 7.

I read a review of Ted Lasso recently that described the show as “spinning its wheels on the highway to Hunky Dory Town,” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Not because nobody is allowed to dislike Ted Lasso. There are plenty of fair criticisms to make about this show. Sometimes it lays the sweetness on thick. Sometimes a joke keeps going after it has already landed. Sometimes you can see the emotional destination coming long before the characters get there.

But “Hunky Dory Town”?

Have you met Ted Lasso?

Because seven episodes into Season 4, I don’t see a guy skipping happily through a world where everything works out. I see one of the loneliest people on television desperately trying to convince everybody, including himself, that he’s okay.

And I think the women of AFC Richmond may finally be the people who make him admit that he isn’t.

When Ted Lasso premiered in 2020, the timing mattered. The world had shut down. People were isolated, scared and exhausted, and suddenly here was this ridiculous American football coach walking into an English soccer club talking about belief, forgiveness and being curious instead of judgmental.

We needed that place.

I’m not convinced we need it any less now.

There is enough cruelty available before breakfast. I don’t need every television show I watch to become another exercise in cynicism just to prove that it is sophisticated. Sometimes optimism is not intellectual laziness. Sometimes choosing kindness when life gives you every excuse to become bitter is the harder thing.

And Ted Lasso has never really been about pretending everything is wonderful anyway.

Ted does that.

That’s different.

Ted’s optimism has always been both his greatest strength and one of his biggest problems. Go all the way back to Season 1 and Michelle’s complaint about him is not that he drinks too much, cheats on her or treats her badly. It’s that his constant optimism can be exhausting. Their marriage is falling apart, Ted desperately wants to fix it, and eventually he has to face the one problem that no amount of biscuits, jokes or inspirational speeches can solve:

You can’t make somebody love you.

That wound never really disappeared.

Ted learned how to accept the divorce. That doesn’t necessarily mean he healed from it.

Now Season 4 has put him back in London with Michelle and Henry there too. On paper, Ted has more of his family around him than he did during those first Richmond years. You might expect that to make him less lonely.

It seems to be doing the opposite.

That makes sense to me in a way I probably wish it didn’t.

Some of us define ourselves through family. Being a husband and father isn’t simply one part of the résumé. It becomes the center of the whole thing. You can have a career. You can have friends. You can build things you’re proud of and have people tell you that you’re successful.

But if the thing you used to answer the question Who am I? changes, all the other answers can suddenly feel a lot smaller.

That’s why the dating material this season matters more than I initially thought it did.

Ted isn’t simply a single guy who needs to get back out there. In his mind, he already made his choice. He found the woman. He built the family. He committed himself to that life.

Then somebody else changed the terms.

Michelle wants to know about his personal life. She thinks he should date. She can say that because, from her perspective, the marriage is over and Ted deserves to move forward.

But imagine hearing that if some stupid little corner of you is still wondering whether everybody being together in London might somehow make your old life possible again.

Ted smiles.

Of course he does.

That’s what Ted does.

Because those aren’t the words of a man living in Hunky Dory Town.

Those are the words of somebody trying to believe about himself the thing he has spent years teaching everybody else.

And then Ted does exactly what everybody has been telling him to do. He stops hiding behind the app, finds the woman he actually likes and asks her out.

She rejects him.

She’s seeing somebody else.

That’s life.

There’s no magic Ted speech that makes her reconsider. No universe rewarding him because he finally showed courage. He takes the risk and gets hurt again.

But he took it.

That matters.

It also changes how I’m looking at the entire Lady Greyhounds storyline.

The obvious Season 4 story would have been incredibly easy to write: Ted fixed a struggling men’s football club, so now Ted is going to use the Power of Positivity to fix a struggling women’s football club.

Except these women don’t seem particularly interested in being fixed.

They have jobs. Kids. Bills. Relationships. Cars that break down. Lives outside football that don’t disappear because Coach Lasso put a BELIEVE sign on the wall.

They already believe.

Belief isn’t their problem.

That’s why Alice changing the message matters. Ted’s philosophy isn’t rejected, but it isn’t sufficient either. The women are taking what Ted gives them and adding what their reality requires.

And I think they’re doing the same thing to Ted.

Season 1 Ted was the emotional anchor AFC Richmond didn’t know it needed.

Season 4 may be reversing that arrangement.

Ted came back thinking he was here to coach another team. Instead he’s surrounded by women who express things he suppresses, deal with realities he hasn’t experienced and refuse to let optimism become a substitute for honesty.

Maybe Ted’s job isn’t to save the Lady Greyhounds.

Maybe the Lady Greyhounds are here because Ted has finally reached the point where being everybody else’s source of strength isn’t enough.

Being loving is not the same thing as being healed.

Being forgiving is not the same thing as never being angry.

And accepting that somebody stopped loving you is not the same thing as figuring out who you are after they did.

That’s what I think Season 4 is actually about.

Not Hunky Dory Town.

Ted Lasso is surrounded by people who love him and still can’t come up with three words to describe himself.

That isn’t shallow positivity.

That’s a man in trouble.

And maybe, finally, he’s on the right team.