The first time Ted Lasso told someone to believe in themselves, it felt like a warm hand on your shoulder. It was 2020, the world was on fire, and here was this relentlessly cheerful American football coach who had no business being in England, no business coaching soccer, no business being this decent — and yet. We believed it because we needed to.
Six years later, Ted is back, and Sudeikis can still make you laugh until you cry. What’s less certain is whether a show built on optimism has anything left to say to an audience that no longer needs saving.
Season 4 of the Apple TV+ series, which premieres today, doesn’t sidestep that — it leans into it.
Slight spoilers ahead for season 4.
The premiere is a quiet thing. Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins make the trip to Kansas City to offer Ted the head coaching job for AFC Richmond’s newly formed women’s team. That’s essentially the whole episode — the pitch, the conversation, the wait. And in its restraint, it feels like a return to the show’s earliest instincts: still sweet enough to earn the eye roll it never quite gets, still surrounded by enough skepticism to make the warmth feel earned.
Watching it in 2026 feels different for that reason. When the show debuted, gentleness read as radical. Ted’s refusal to be cruel, his instinct to understand rather than to win arguments, his habit of leaving people better than he found them — it felt countercultural, like an actual position worth defending.
The cynics were always there, of course — critics who found Ted’s decency naive, who felt the show was selling something too easy. In 2020, that critique made a kind of sense. We were desperate, and we latched on. But 2026 isn’t 2020. There’s no pandemic reshaping daily life, no collective sense that everything might fall apart at once. What we have instead is something more ordinary and in some ways harder to name: a settling. People are fine. Not hopeful, not despairing — just fine.
That’s the space the show walks into, and it knows it. When we find Ted in Kansas City, he has made peace with his life there — content, unhurried, not looking for anything more. His first instinct when the offer comes is to say no. It takes Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins — people who believe in him enough to cross an ocean — before he says yes, in the episode’s final moments. The show’s case isn’t for optimism; it’s for hope — for the idea that saying yes to something is worth the risk of wanting it.
Ted Lasso has always known the difference, even when its fans pretended otherwise. The show’s best moments were about the cost of niceness — the way Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) had to crack himself open to become someone worth rooting for, the way Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) had to reckon with damage she’d actually done, the way Ted’s warmth was inseparable from grief and anxiety he was carefully not talking about. The Believe sign was never just a motivational poster.
Season 4 sets up a premise built on that same tension. Ted will be coaching a women’s second-division team that nobody, including their own club, expects to succeed — a situation designed to test whether the philosophy holds when the institution has already written the outcome. Whether the show earns what it’s promising takes ten episodes, dropping weekly through Oct. 7, to find out.
The premiere earns the distinction between optimism and hope: optimism is a disposition, something you either have or perform, but hope is a choice you keep making even when you’re comfortable enough not to bother. Six years on, with all the reasons the world has handed the show to stop meaning it, the Believe sign stays up.
