Jason Sudeikis reopened Ted Lasso season 4 in early February 2024, when he gathered the writers in Ojai, California, to see whether the series should continue. The move changes the frame for a show that had been treated as finished after its third season, yet will now return on Aug. 5 with a fourth-season plan in motion.
Ojai writers meeting
“Oh, I don’t know if it’s done,” Sudeikis said when the conversation turned back to the series. Brendan Hunt described the meeting this way: “We were just kind of kicking the tires on it — or, as we were saying at the time, checking the viability of the soil,” which is the kind of process note that tells you the show had moved from a closed ending to active reconsideration.
That meeting produced a concrete direction: the writers liked the idea of a women’s soccer team as Coach Lasso’s new purview. Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly had started working on an idea about Roy Kent, while two other staffers played around with Keeley Jones. Sudeikis also said he was toying with a Leslie Higgins cartoon and a Dani Rojas telenovela, a sign that the room was testing the franchise’s characters in several directions before settling on the new team focus.
Goldstein and Kelly ideas
The shift matters because Sudeikis had said from the outset that he had three seasons of Lasso in his head, and he had been exhausted after writing or rewriting every script while starring in the series. By season three, he was collecting $1 million per episode, so reopening the show was never a casual tweak; it required a real decision to put the machinery back together after more than three years without new episodes.
Ted Lasso also enters this return with a track record that explains why the studio would revisit it. In 2023, it was the year’s most watched streaming original with 283 million viewing hours, and it has won 13 Emmys and a Peabody. That combination of audience volume and awards is rare enough that a fourth season was always going to be a business decision as much as a creative one.
Waddingham checks in
Hannah Waddingham said the cast kept checking in with one another while the idea was taking shape: “So, we’d just reach out to each other,” and go, “Have you heard?” “Have you heard?” “Have you heard?” Ted, Rebecca, Keeley and Roy will all be back, but the show is moving from the male team at the center of the first three seasons to AFC Richmond’s all-female team, which gives the return a different operating model from the one viewers already know.
The practical takeaway is simple: Ted Lasso season 4 is not just a nostalgia extension, but a retooled continuation with a new team focus and the core names back in play. What remains unresolved is how much of the fourth season had actually been written or produced at the time of the Ojai meeting, which makes Aug. 5 less a finish line than the point where the restart becomes visible.
