Television

The Diamond Dogs Are Back: 'Ted Lasso' Season 3 Confirmed At AppleTV+

Ted Lasso season 3
By Ben Pearson

Back in August, Apple handed out a greenlight for a second season of Ted Lasso, the heartwarming and hilarious sports comedy starring Jason Sudeikis. There were some rumblings and rumors about a potential third season being in the works as well, and now that has been confirmed: Ted Lasso season 3 is officially coming to AppleTV+.

Earlier this month, Ted Lasso co-creator Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Cougar Town) gave fans some hope that even though the second season hasn't started filming yet, a third season was in the cards.

Now Apple has made that official, announcing an early season 3 renewal ahead of season 2's start of production. Filming for season 2 gets underway in London in early January 2021, though no release dates for future seasons have been revealed yet.

Jason Sudeikis plays the title character, a Kansas football coach who has no knowledge of soccer but is nonetheless hired to be the coach of a U.K. football (AKA soccer) club called AFC Richmond. That somewhat goofy premise is deepened relatively quickly into something a bit more complicated than it appears, but truthfully, the reason the show works so well is because of its characters, not its hook. The sports plot points are pretty well-worn, but during the course of season 1's ten episodes, the show makes you fall in love with – or at least understand and sympathize with – pretty much every character, with the exception of the show's outright antagonist.

Sudeikis is wonderful as a happy-go-lucky, wildly optimistic Midwestern goofball who represents aspects like hope and fun which have been seemingly sapped from the world over the past year, and he brings a surprising layer of depth to the proceedings in a subplot that may be the most heartbreaking element of the series.

The rest of the ensemble cast is equally terrific: Brendan Hunt plays Coach Beard, Lasso's tight-lipped pal and second-in-command; Juno Temple plays a seemingly vapid girlfriend of one of the players who proves to have more going on beneath the surface that initially appears; Hannah Waddingham, who played the "shame" nun, Septa Unella, on Game of Thrones, is unrecognizable here as the team's owner; Jeremy Swift as Higgins, the owner's lackey who comes into his own by the season's end; Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent, an aging veteran on the team who clashes with Phil Dunster's hotshot young superstar Jamie Tartt; and Nick Mohammed, who plays a locker room attendant who's given the chance to exert his influence over the team.

I wrote about why the show is great in a recent edition of /Film's Quarantine Stream column, but if you don't believe me, maybe Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn will convince you:

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