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The Emmy-winning Apple TV comedy returns Aug. 5.
Key Points
- Jason Sudeikis explained why his Apple TV series Ted Lasso almost didn’t have another season.
- The Saturday Night Live alum finds playing the optimist “infectious.”
- The comedy returns for a fourth season next month with a time jump.
Jason Sudeikis was earning $1 million per episode by the time the third season of his hit show Ted Lasso came around, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to come back. Really.
“That wasn’t a negotiation tactic,” the former Saturday Night Live cast member explained in an interview published Tuesday in the Hollywood Reporter. “The story was told. Ted went home to be with his son. I wasn’t going to have Ted uproot their life to justify the money truck. It made no sense to me.”
The Apple TV dramedy about an optimistic American football coach managing a British soccer team, despite a lack of experience, dropped the last episode of the third season in May 2023. (Joe Biden was still president!)
When audiences last saw the title character, he had traveled back to Kansas City, Mo., to be with his son. The stories of other characters, such as Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca, Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, Juno Temple’s Keeley, and Brendan Hunt’s Coach Beard, had been tied up too.
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Sudeikis changed his mind, of course. And it had a lot to do with his love for the manager.
“It is infectious to play a character who sees the best in people and isn’t mad at the world for all its foibles and bullies and shadows,” Sudeikis said. “It’s not like I’m Daniel Day-Lewis, but it was good to live in that — to have that coursing through your brain and your body all day. It still is.”
When new episodes of the Emmy winner drop next month, the story won’t be picking up where it left off.
“Time has passed,” Hunt, who also co-created the series, told Entertainment Weekly, in May. “We’re picking it up, I believe it’s three years later. So nothing can quite stay fully the same in that time.”
Hunt said then that questions about what Lasso’s return to Richmond, working with another team, will mean to his relationships will be answered quickly.
He said he’s “not against” another three-season arc.
The new season of Ted Lasso premieres Aug. 5 on Apple TV.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
