'Ted Lasso' Season 4 Deserves a Red Card for Screen Time Mismanagement
Dun-dun-dunnnn! The Emmy-winning sports comedy closed out a so-so season with a whimper.
I'd thus far steered clear of the Ted Lasso Season 4 discourse.
For one, I admittedly checked out on the Emmy-winning Apple TV comedy following Season 2. Plus, the likes of Alan Sepinwall and The A.V. Club's Saloni Gajjar have the reviewing beat thoroughly covered, while TVLine's Ryan Schwartz and Decider's Nicole Galucci offer best-in-class reporting and interviews. There's no lack of insightful coverage.
Still, I watched Season 4 on a casual, non-professional basis, and what it all led to, in the finale that dropped October 7, was a pretty big "L."
Matt Webb Mitovich
Sepinwall et al. have covered, very well, the big sources of Season 4 dissatisfaction/frustration. The underwritten, one-note members of the Lady Greyhounds. The tired trope foisted upon Roy/Keeley — à la "You had better start dating other people, as much as it will visibly pain me!" — that, thankfully, had a sweet culmination (wholly independent of the wheel-spinning that preceded it). The way that Ted's scenes with son Henry, and the even rarer ones with ex-wife Michelle, almost aggressively fall well shy of what they can and should be.
But what really grinds my gears about the Season 4 finale, titled "Being Alive," is how it revealed Tracey Ullman's run as Zelda to ultimately be a colossal waste of screen time — minutes-per-episode that could have been allotted to any of the short-changed arcs cited above.
Matt Webb Mitovich
I almost wish that Zelda's "Dun-dun-dunnn!" arrival at the shareholders meeting had been the jaw-dropper she envisioned it to be, that her secretly amassed majority ownership in AFC Richmond actually held water, and was not exposed by Rebecca and Higgins as the subverted boondoggle it really was. I mean, yes, such an obvious follow-through on that storyline would have done massive damage to the Rebecca and Higgins characters, making them look quite the gullible fools. But at least it'd leave us with a (messy) cliffhanger and justify Zelda's presence throughout the season.
Instead, the Zelda storyline... petered out. Even in the moment, on-screen, you could sense the writers had little idea how to put any kind of a bow on it. Rebecca elects to "forgive" her would-be Judas and offer a truce-making handshake? When Zelda, if successful, would have gleefully yanked out from under Rebecca that which she holds dear? Yeah, I dunno about that.
On the topic of screen time mismanagement, why not show us Rebecca and Higgins getting wise to the planned coup and acting to thwart it? Steal three minutes from elsewhere in the past two episodes to do so. Even shoot it as a cutaway flashback, for when Rebecca flaunts in Zelda's face how they'd outwitted her.
Matt Webb Mitovich
It'd be one thing if Zelda as a character was even one-third as funny as the great Tracey Ullman can be. Zelda was loud, she was brassy, she was vulgar. But she wasn't terribly clever with her quips. Did she empower Keeley some, early in the season? Well, sure. But Rebecca had been doing that for three seasons on.
I am also of the opinion that the Zelda "twist," well, you could see it coming down Richmond Green, long before the show pointedly let us in on it. Other than being a loud, brassy, vulgar, redundancy in the front office and Keeley's professional life, she served no significant purpose. Even her big "saves" on behalf of the Lady Greyhounds and Dani Rojas' contract always had this undercurrent of, "Yeah, but what is she really up to?" Clearly, she had a self-serving end game.
Instead, the more passionate Ted Lasso fans are left to wonder what Season 4, its first one spent with a women's football club, could have been. Think of all the time we spent getting to really know Roy, Jamie and Sam in Seasons 1-2, as well as Ted himself, Coach Beard and Nate/Evil Nate. Who were their female counterparts beyond barely sketched archetypes?
I know I missed "the" mid-season episode that shed meaningful light on assistant manager Alice Chilton, but how sad it is that she spent so much of her first season meek (when not a bit mean) and feeling insecure? Only her "Say yes" initiative, her recent counseling of sidelined Gemma, and the closing reveal that she'd been toying with Ted's chair all along (including her final smirk) did anything to elevate the character.
What did you think of Ted Lasso Season 4, finale included? And in the event of official renewal, do you look forward to spending more time with assistant manager Ted and the Lady Greyhounds?
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