The Hollywood Reporter published a cover story about the making of Ted Lasso just before the new season aired, and boy, was it a doozy. Co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis at one point just admits that he doesn’t know how to make TV.
Discussing the notoriously over-schedule, over-budget production of the narratively bloated Season 3, Sudeikis said that “we were budgeted as a 30-minute show when it became much more…Some people can look at a whiteboard of story ideas and know, ‘That is 22 minutes, that is 37 minutes.’ I haven’t done enough [serialized TV] to do that.”
Did former showrunner Bill Lawrence, current showrunner Jack Burditt, or anyone at Apple TV at any point stop to consider that giving a guy who doesn’t know how to make a TV show that much power over the making of a TV show might be a bad way to make a TV show? Apparently not. Instead, Burditt and Apple have gone out of their way this year to create a fountain pen that writes upside-down instead of just using a pencil, to borrow a phrase. When you have Burditt praising Season 4’s production by noting that it only went a month over schedule, you know what kind of sandbox you’re playing in.
I bring all of this up to note just how perfectly Season 4 Episode 5 embodies Sudeikis’s ethos toward making Ted Lasso. He has no sense of craft in rendering stories, emotions, or ideas in a way that properly and interestingly communicates those stories, emotions, and ideas. The more power he has accrued, the worse it has gotten. It’s jarring to watch an episode from Season 1 and feel just how much more efficiently the show delivers jokes, thoughts, and meaning. Though I may not have always enjoyed or aligned with those thoughts and meanings, there was never a question of what Sudeikis, Lawrence, and the writers were after.
Episode 5 illustrates just how far from that sturdy efficiency the show has traveled. Rebecca’s boyfriend Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn) announces on a visit that he has accepted a new job that will base him in London. His daughter’s mother has also done the same, so now, Matthijs can still be with his daughter and spend more time with Rebecca.
Rebecca, naturally, spins out. After all, they’ve been in a three-year honeymoon phase, which has involved FaceTime sexting, quickies in her office, and all-is-forgiven broken dinner dates. “What if he starts hating me? What if I start hating him?!” she laments to Ted one morning. It’s all too much to bear.
The root of the problem, though, is that Matthijs didn’t discuss such a life-changing event with Rebecca before he made the decision, and his daughter later reveals that it was her mother, not Matthijs, who initially got a new job and decided to move. When Rebecca asks Matthijs about this, he is visibly upset. It’s worth quoting the dialogue exactly here.
REBECCA: “You’re moving here because your ex needs to move here, not the other way around. You’re moving here for her job.”
MATTHIJS: “Whoa whoa, what are you talking about? Why do you think that?”
REBECCA: “[Your daughter] told me.”
MATTHIJS: “Well she’s wrong! She got it mixed up. Please, she’s ten. Why were you guys even talking about this?”
REBECCA: “I was just asking her about the move.”
MATTHIJS: “Well, I wish you hadn’t. (Gets out of bed, crosses the room) She’s in the middle enough with me and her mom’s shit. Look, I’ve worked really hard to shield her from any of that, and I don’t want her to be brought into it.”
REBECCA: “Okay, look, it’s fine.”
MATTHIJS: “No, it’s not fine! (pause) Look, I wanted to move here, because I thought we were in a good place.”
REBECCA: “Okay, I’m sorry.”
MATTHIJS: “I think we should take a break. Take some time apart to see — to feel — if this is what we really want. Both of us.”
By episode’s end, Rebecca takes the blame when relating the incident to Keeley. “Matthijs said he was gonna move here and I freaked out and I’ve totally ruined it and we’re on a break,” Rebecca sobs. Sudeikis and Burditt strongly suggest that the whole situation is Rebecca’s fault.
If that is indeed the belief we are meant to infer, then the dialogue written for Matthijs and the calibration of van der Grijn’s performance are completely wrong. If Matthijs’s daughter is indeed confused about which of her parents instigated the London move, angrily declaring “she got it mixed up” without corroborating evidence does not paint Matthijs in a great light.
The denial of Rebecca’s perceived reality, the deflection of blame to his daughter, the admonishment to not discuss personal matters with his daughter under the cover of her own emotional well-being, and then escalating to a demand for temporary separation — this is the behavior of an emotionally abusive partner, not that of a protective father upset that his girlfriend may inflame his daughter’s undefined emotional vulnerability with her mother.
I don’t believe that Sudeikis and Burditt are so consciously misogynistic that they intended for Rebecca’s “mistake” to be so flimsy, or for Matthijs to come off so unsettlingly. But that’s where the issue of craft comes in. Sudeikis is the final word on story decisions, and he lacks the technical wherewithal at the levels of writing, cinematography, performance, and editing to properly communicate such a complex series of emotions as the scene requires. All we are left with is an angry man trying to hide his potentially shitty behavior by making his daughter a fool and implying his girlfriend has commitment issues.
Such a scene also leaves a sour retrospective taste in one’s mouth over Ted’s insistence that Alice take the job as assistant coach back in Episode 2. Even though we are meant to see Ted’s actions as charming, and that Alice’s acceptance was one she was primed to offer even before Ted asked her to work for him, the scene still involves a man telling a woman in an empty cinder-blocked basement room that she has five seconds to say yes, and all the privacy she is given is said man turning his back in the corner (which he only does for three seconds). Kinda creepy when you put it that way!
The lack of tonal calibration muddies Alice’s broader emotional arc, as well. Richmond is playing Chelsea in the FA Cup, and they’re playing them at home. This is a big deal! A team’s FA Cup opponent is drawn randomly, as is the location of the match. The prestige for a small club like Richmond to host a colossus like Chelsea is immense, not to mention the financial windfall such a game would create. (Something the show doesn’t acknowledge, which would have actually been quite funny, is that smaller clubs prefer to play away from home against big clubs, because they receive a portion of ticket sales.)
Alice is stressed out about it. Richmond will be on national television for the first time. The spotlight will have never shone brighter. We know from Episodes 2 and 3 how much of Alice’s career has been spent toiling in obscurity and disrespect, both as a player and a coach. “This was their chance to make a statement,” Alice tells Ted after they lose the match. “Well that’s the great thing about sports,” Ted responds. “There’s always another chance.” “Not in my experience,” Alice shoots back. She’s right.
Alice has not been known to deal with stress in a way that avoids belittling her players. She is positively vicious toward them this week. “Stop playing like you know you don’t belong on this team,” she snaps at Shannon (Shannon Hayes) during practice. When Gemma (Abbie Hern) tries to defend Shannon, Alice sends every player for fifteen laps around the training pitch.
Halftime during the Chelsea match is even worse. “That was pathetic,” she barks. “Your first televised match and this is how you play. It’s not my fault you’re the ones playing like shit. You’re embarrassing yourselves. You’re embarrassing all of us.” Mixed in with all of this vitriol are reaction shots of Alice looking haunted, weighed down by the moment. She’s reacting badly, but it comes from the trauma of her professional life up to that point, you see.
I’m pulling a red card on Burditt and Sudeikis here. Not many coaches in 2025 with Alice’s experience in women’s football would be so callous as to tear their players down for losing badly to Chelsea. English women’s football isn’t like many sports leagues in America. There is a clear stratification of talent, and Chelsea is at the top of that pyramid. No team at Richmond’s level would walk into the locker room at halftime down 3-0 to a club like Chelsea and think that they had failed. Oh, they’d be pissed that they were losing, make no mistake about it. But that rage wouldn’t curdle into bitterness or self-pity. Teams like Richmond never beat teams like Chelsea, and everyone knows that. The victory is to play as hard as you can, and give the fans a “fucking show,” as Siobhan (Rex Hayes) puts it.
Sudeikis, Burditt, and the writers are so obsessed with putting Alice into a Nate-shaped hole, out of which she can dig her way in the most heartfelt manner possible, that they tip the scales to make her more vicious than basically any real-life analogue would be. She’s either a vulnerable sparrow or she’s a pitbull, nothing in between. Simply put, her arc has become storytelling without craft. Ugh.
GAME NOTES:
- Beard went to Jane’s one-person show, which is apparently an elaborate ruse to sleep with him again. This whole emotional BDSM kink that these two have had with each other ran out of steam years ago. Move on.
- Keeley discovers that Roy has been on several dates with Dr. Erin Beaumont, and only now does she realize what an utterly stupid idea it was to put him through this whole ordeal. She deserves whatever fallout comes her way.
- Mady and Margy (Annelise Heywood and Mercedes Assad) apparently break up at some point between Episodes 2 and 5, but get back together when they see Ted eating a hot dog alone. Speaking of a lack of craft, I didn’t realize those two side characters were even dating, because the scene that revealed that information in Episode 2 was shot from so far away and was so poorly lit that I couldn’t make out their faces.
Evan Davis is a contributing writer to Decider. He hosts Expected Own Goals, a podcast about women’s soccer.
