Juno Temple is back as Keeley Jones when Ted Lasso returns on Aug. 5 for a fourth season built around AFC Richmond’s all-female team. The comeback lands after the series last aired in 2023, when it was the year’s most watched streaming original with 283 million viewing hours.
Ojai rewrite session
Jason Sudeikis pulled the writers together in Ojai, California, in early February 2024 after previously urging the show to air its third and purportedly final season. He said, “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if it’s done,’ ” and that change of mind opened the door to a return instead of a clean ending.
Brendan Hunt described the group’s work as, “We were just kind of kicking the tires on it — or, as we were saying at the time, checking the viability of the soil.” Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly had started working on an idea about Roy Kent, while two other staffers played around with a Keeley Jones idea and Sudeikis toyed with a Leslie Higgins cartoon and a Dani Rojas telenovela.
Hannah Waddingham check-ins
Hannah Waddingham said the cast kept circling the same question while the future was still unsettled: “So, we’d just reach out to each other,” and go, “Have you heard?” “Have you heard?” “Have you heard?” That kind of uncertainty hung over a show that had won 13 Emmys, two best comedy trophies, and a Peabody before going quiet.
Goldstein said, “It all seems easy now, but it was hard because it’s not a spinoff,” and added, “You’re like, it’s not Frasier; Cheers still exists — it’s more like you’re adding a room to the bar.” The business logic is straightforward enough: Ted Lasso was one of the rare streaming comedies with both scale and awards, so bringing it back with the same core names carries more weight than a routine revival.
Aug. 5 at AFC Richmond
Ted, Rebecca, Keeley, and Roy are all back for Ted Lasso season 4, but the team in focus changes from the first three seasons’ male setup to AFC Richmond’s all-female team. That shift gives the series a new engine without asking viewers to learn a new world from scratch, which is the safest way to revive a comedy that had been treated as finished and still had unfinished business in its creative center.
By Aug. 5, the question is not whether Ted Lasso still has an audience; the 2023 viewing total already answered that. The real test is how far the show can move that audience with a different team dynamic and the returning cast around it.
