Ted Lasso – Being Alive Review

Well, that was a fitting end to a truly muddled season of television. For all of the positive gains Ted Lasso made over the last several episodes – all of which pulled the focus from the host of returning characters (save for Roy and Keeley) and onto the new members of the Lady Greyhounds – the finale pretty much reset things back to early on in the season, bringing the focus back almost solely onto the legacy characters, bringing back various members of the original men’s club for cameos (or, in the case of Nate, a strange return that only served to remind just how much the writing destroyed everything good and interesting about his character back in season three), and not even bothering to show us what happened in that final game of the season. Throw in the absolute nothing burger of an arc with Zelda’s failed takeover of the team – which I’ll get into below – and that was quite the disappointing end to an overall disappointing season. And with rumors swirling that a fifth season is imminent, well, I honestly don’t know just what there is left to show us.

Let’s start with the wholly confusing Zelda arc. When it initially appeared that the show was just going to let Zelda be a chance for Tracey Ullman to let loose and be weird, I was more or less okay with the character. Perhaps she could have been the antithesis to Rebecca, showing her that she could lighten up a touch, have some fun with her internal team, and care a touch less about the bottom line. But, really, just having Zelda there as an example of what unlimited money and excess can lead to would have been okay, even if it took away from our new team and the host of characters on it that the show just didn’t seem to want to spend time with. However, this late season heel turn – wherein her bid to steal Richmond out from under Rebecca seemingly came out of nowhere – was just such a poorly plotted arc that it was almost laughable.

Taking into account the various comments I’ve seen from folks who have looked into this deeper than I* that Rebecca held 51% of the shares after Rupert’s last attempt to take the team back earlier in the series, that entire sequence at the shareholders meeting where Zelda sprung her trap, Higgins and Rebecca countered, and Zelda sauntered off into the sunset without the team control (thanks to Mae’s bequest to Rebecca of her 2% share in the team) just felt like such a complete waste of time. There were zero repercussions for anyone – Zelda is still the minority shareholder (so, I guess, could be around next season?) barring a sale, Rebecca still owns the majority, and we had no lead up to any of this to make it make sense. And Zelda’s reasoning for wanting to be the majority shareholder was so that she could stick it to the men who own Premier League Teams because they’re all jerks? Like, what? Where did that come from? Why is this the path she thinks she should take to do that? What would controlling Richmond even get her in that Boy’s Club? Wouldn’t buying one of their teams out from under them be even more devious? It’s such an underdeveloped, under explained moment that I actually just rolled my eyes when I heard it.

*While I didn’t go back and rewatch, the prevailing belief on social media was that the Milk sisters had previously sold their shares to Rebecca during the Rupert takeover attempt, so she would have already had them. 

When I look back on season four, one of the most disappointing elements of it will be how it utilized Rebecca. From spending several episodes dealing with her absolute dud of a boyfriend (now fiance, sigh) to her absolute spiral over not being enough of a feminist to this strange last minute arc to save her control of the club, it felt as if the writers didn’t know what to do with Rebecca considering she “got her happy ending” at the close of season three. There were so many interesting paths to take with a women-fronted football club getting into the women’s football space (including her interrogating her own biases when she ignores all potential female candidates for the head coaching role and chooses to go with a male coach she’s worked with before – that was a great plot point, just poorly executed), and the show opted to dive into none of them and focus on her personal life being a mess and another woman trying to steal the team out from under her. What an utter waste of the character and Hannah Waddingham.

Now, as for the series’ best overall arc, we all knew the season was going to end with Alice stepping into the manager role. Everything has been leading us to that point, so that revelation wasn’t a shock. Seeing that Ted stepped down into an assistant role was. There’s certainly a story arc to be had in seeing if Ted can truly be an assistant coach – we’ve seen him try to demure when Trent Crimm was going to name his book The Lasso Way, so we know he has wanted to be seen just as part of the team and not the whole focus in the past. But is there enough left here to have another season about this team?

Sure, we still know next to nothing about most of the players – which is something that continues to frustrate me about the fourth season as a whole – so with Roy now off at Chelsea and Ted stepping back (which would allow for the writers to have entire episodes that aren’t about Ted or don’t have him at all), there’s the potential to make the show about the women’s team and not about Ted’s role as its coach. That, of course, begs the question: Is that show, where the focus is on the women’s team and not on Ted’s role within it, Ted Lasso? If Alice is the coach, the focus would, presumably, shift to her more than Ted. With the team coming into their own, moving up, getting more money as a result, there’s stories there as well. But who Ted is, what Ted means to this team, and how he leads them aren’t stories to be told anymore under this new structure. Food for thought as we wait for the official renewal news.

But if the show returns for a fifth season, the one thing it absolutely needs to do is find a clear narrative arc. Because what it tried this time out was not it. No, it wasn’t as chaotic and unfocused as season three (which was an absolute disaster of a show by the end of things), but it wasn’t a cohesive story. From characters acting out of character and then suddenly turning on a dime (looking at you, Keeley and Rebecca), to poor writing tropes that drew out the inevitable for absolutely no reason (that Ten Date arc was excruciating), to a complete lack of focus on the new characters who were presumably meant to be the focus of a story about a women’s football club (I honestly can only name a handful of the players, which is such a shame), Ted Lasso needs to take a step back and figure out what it wants to be about if it wants to move forward with this same premise. Yes, the Alice arc worked pretty well – in no small part thanks to the wonderful work of Tanya Reynolds. And Ted was Ted, which is always like a nice warm hug to see. There’s once again a solid framework for a good comedy here. The writers just need to figure out how to put the pieces together and create interesting characters with coherent arcs. You know, be good television writers. They’ve done it before, I hope they can do it again.