Ted Lasso Season 4: Is It Really Happening? Here's What We Know

The fate of Ted Lasso has always hinged on Sudeikis, who’d originated the character in NBC Sports videos. While being open that they would love to extend Ted Lasso, one of the biggest and most acclaimed comedies of the past decade, Apple and Warner Bros. executives have made it clear that it would be up to Sudeikis whether the show would continue.

The Saturday Night Live alum, who co-created Ted Lasso with Hunt, Joe Kelly and Bill Lawrence, had originally conceived the comedy as a three-season story arc and he stuck with the plan despite the series’ enormous success. But he had not shut the door to more Ted Lasso — which is why Season 3 was not labeled as final — contingent on finding the right idea. Much to Ted Lasso fans’ delight, more than a year after the Season 3 finale, it looks like that has happened.

With its uplifting tone and a good-natured, eternal optimist lead character, Ted Lasso was the perfect show to launch at the height of the pandemic in August 2020. The comedy became an instant global hit and Apple’s signature and most-watched ever original series.

In addition to its immense popularity that catapulted it into the pop culture zeitgeist, Ted Lasso earned 13 Emmy Awards during its original three-season run, including two back-to-back Outstanding Comedy Series trophies and acting wins for Sudeikis (2), Goldstein (2), who is also a writer-producer on the show, and Waddingham.

The May 2023 Season 3 finale saw Keeley and Rebecca potentially partnering for a new venture, AFC Richmond Women’s Team, with all the main characters getting a happy ending, including Ted, last seen coaching his son on a soccer field in Kansas.

After securing the trio, the studio is expected to start reaching out to Ted Lasso cast members with SAG-AFTRA contracts whose options had expired, so they will need to make new deals, we hear. In addition to co-creators/executive producers Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) and Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard), that is believed to include Juno Temple (Keeley Jones). We hear one of the Ted Lasso OGs, Phil Dunster (Jamie Tart), has not been picked up, presumably due to a conflict with another series; he is on both Prime Video’s The Devil’s Hour and Apple’s Surface.

It is unclear which other stars may be approached about Season 4; the cast have all said repeatedly that they would be happy to reprise their roles if an opportunity arises. Many would likely pop in for guest appearances.

Getting the cast back paves the way toward a Season 4 greenlight, contingent on budget approval and scheduling as actors whose options have lapsed may have joined other series that have them in first position, sources said.

While the outreach to the cast is underway, early preparations are also being made to open a writers room. If all elements come together, we hear production on a fourth season is eyeing an early 2025 start. Reps for WBTV and Apple TV+ declined comment.

Starting the process for a Season 4 greenlight indicates that the main Ted Lasso driving force on and off-screen, Sudeikis, is on board for a new installment as the studio would not have proceeded without his consent.

A hypothetical fourth season of Ted Lasso has seemed, from the first moment people started shrugging toward its potential existence, like a pipe dream. There’s something almost poignant about Apple’s unwillingness to bid a final, definitive farewell to the series, despite it telegraphing, with what we’d call some pretty extreme measures, that its third-season finale was a pretty good stopping point. After all, nobody likes to watch a loved one—i.e., the massive amounts of subscription dollars and Emmys the well-loved sports comedy regularly brought in for the streamer—say goodbye, and so AppleTV+’s refusal to admit things were over almost bordered on sweet.

Now, though, it’s starting to seem like the streamer’s “Ain’t over until it’s over, even though Jason Sudeikis kind of said it’s over” attitude is starting to move into “actually spending money” territory, with Deadline revealing today that Apple has officially opted to exercise its contract options on series stars Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, and Jeremy Swift. (I.e., the three members of the show’s main cast apparently covered under British actors union Equity.) That’s ahead of reported plans to secure new SAG-AFTRA contracts with the rest of the show’s cast (including co-creators Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt), whose contracts had lapsed in the 15 months since the show’s third-season finale aired. Provided the series can get its people in order—and most of the cast has expressed an interest in returning, if asked—it’d then be time to get a writer’s room back together to figure out where AFC Richmond heads next.

This is all pretty firmly in question mark territory, of course, with no bigger question mark than Sudeikis himself, who’s previously said that the show’s third season “is the end of this story that we wanted to tell,” and whose limited availability beyond that run has been one of the reasons for potentially ending there. Even if Ted himself doesn’t feature prominently in this hypothetical new season, Sudeikis has been a major, and frequently the dominant (after co-creator Bill Lawrence stepped back to focus more on other projects) creative voice behind the scenes on the series, so it remains to be seen what role he’ll take moving forward, if there is a moving forward.

So, yeah: Still extremely hypothetical, but money has changed hands at this point, which is as good a sign as any that there might be something here to Believe in.