Ted Lasso is over: long live Ted Lasso?

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It’s a sure sign a movie, book, or series is good, when you find yourself saddened when it ends, because there won’t be more of it to look forward to. First time it happened to me was with J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. I might have been 10, I guess. “Well, I’m back”, said Sam Gamgee. 10 year old me was a pool of tears. The only consolation was that I could, after a little break, read it all again. And there was also the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales …

Well, the last episode of Ted Lasso series 3 ‘dropped’ last night, as the cool set say. Inevitably, it wasn’t the best of the lot, not by a distance. At times, the show’s telltale good-heartedness spilled over for mine into twee, but I never liked Sound of Music either.

It looks like this is a definitive end, and you almost have to hope there won’t be a series four. Characteristically, there was even some reflection on whether this was really it, encoded into the script of the finale. Can anything be perfect?, the characters philosophise. Or is it better to accept imperfection, and work with it?

All good things, anyway, come to the end, as far as we humans know. It’s unlikely there’ll be a Silmarillion for Ted Lasso’s Richmond FC.

The big question of Ted Lasso is how on earth this odd-ball (pun noted), quirky show about an American grid iron coach making it in the English Premier League with a second rank Soccer team could ever become so stratospherically internationally successful?

We only got into it recently, this year, in fact. I’ve never been much for sporting dramas. Either sport itself is drama, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, why watch? If it is, why watch a show about it? And how can nonprofessionals be presented as playing like the pros? — it never convinces.

Thankfully, there are just a small number of would-be ‘live’ takes from Richmond FC’s actual soccer games. Some of it is pretty good. In fact, the show is far less about football, than the lives of the small circle of the series’ major characters: the boss, Rebecca (and her sleazy ex-husband Rupert), Coach Ted (and his broken family), his buddy…