New 'Ted Lasso' brings its radical empathy and kind masculinity into women's sports

LAUREN GILGER: Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that Ted Lasso — everyone’s favorite overly optimistic football coach — is back.

[CLIP FROM “TED LASSO” SEASON 4 PLAYS]

This time, he’s back in Richmond, brought on board to coach their new women’s team, the Lady Greyhounds.

The new season came as a welcome surprise to AFC Richmond fans — including me — after the show officially ended three years ago, one of all of our favorite COVID comfort watches alongside shows like “The Great British Bake Off.”

But, how does this show read in 2026?The Show’s resident pop culture expert, Amanda Kehrberg, has some thoughts. She’s a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication who studies digital culture.

Good morning, Amanda.

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AMANDA KEHRBERG: Good morning, Lauren.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, so I have not seen the new season yet of “Ted Lasso,” so no spoilers. But I just have so many positive associations with Ted Lasso, Amanda. I cannot wait to watch this. What do you think? Is this the most positive show on TV today?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: I think it is, and I think we really needed it back, and that’s partly what made Jason Sudeikis actually bring it back was all of the fan attention over the years saying, like, “Hey, this was the kind of influence that we miss in our lives. This was the kind of escape from our daily lives that we really want back, the kinds of examples of people we want to be and lives we want to live and communities we want to build.”

And so I think it’s really, really exciting to have it back. Visually, at the moment it starts, you get these bold, saturated colors, you know, primary colors. Like everything about it is so bright and welcoming and exciting.

But I will warn you — and I think this helps it not feel so naive, I think. It’s difficult in the era we’re in now to bring back this just bubbly, positive character without us sort of distrusting him. And I think they transition well. The first episode, when we meet him again, has some moments of kind of denouement. Like if you remember the end of “The Graduate” that’s so famous where they keep the camera rolling and you see their faces start to fade.

LAUREN GILGER: Yep.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: There’s a moment like that in the premiere of this season. So you start to kind of see some cracks, some like at least sense of, ”OK, this is where we’re moving forward from. He’s back, but he’s still a real person.”

LAUREN GILGER: Right. I think that’s what “Ted Lasso” has always done so well, right? Like, it is a very positive and incredibly optimistic show that makes you feel good. But it’s also, it deals with some not-so-rosy things, and they come across like real people in a way.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Exactly. Yes, it deals with mental health. It deals with parenthood. It deals with divorce. So many things, also, that Jason Sudeikis was dealing with in real life. So it finds a way to talk about extremely serious, challenging issues with this kind of radical empathy and hope and joy that I think could teach all of us, frankly, in the way that we talk to each other online a thing or two.

LAUREN GILGER: Radical empathy. I like that. All right, so I want to talk about Ted Lasso’s version of masculinity, right? Like, he’s a football coach, soccer, whatever you want to call it. But he also deals with, like you said, mental health issues. He talks with a therapist in one of those seasons. He loves the people in his life very genuinely, right? How does this play into today’s sort of, I guess, looksmaxxing manosphere kind of realm?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: I know. I think I think that’s such a good question because there is so much content being made for young men and even kids today that is teaching them that masculinity needs to be this very traditional, dominant force. And not just that, but that the only real uh things of value that you can offer are how you look and then this sort of material wealth, and those are the things that you can bring to the table.

And Ted Lasso has such a different version of what masculinity can look like, that it can be this incredibly nuanced, human self that that can cry, that can have panic attacks, um that can inspire a room, you know, can can give the great Henry VIII speech or on the battlefield and and still then curl under the covers and and feel sad. It’s it can be all of these things.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, all of these things. OK, we have to talk about the the women’s sports part of this, right? Like, Ted’s back to coach the Lady Greyhounds. He’s got a new kind of prickly assistant coach who’s a woman. And this is familiar territory for the show’s star in real life, right, for Jason Sudeikis?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, yes. Yes, huge WNBA fan, has season tickets to the New York Liberty and became famous during Caitlin Clark’s rise at Iowa and then into the WNBA for being courtside a lot of the time, for wearing lots of Caitlin Clark and WNBA gear. Huge, huge fan of women’s sports, and I think that’s another reason why the show came back, because switching to this focus on women’s sports, I think, is something that he’s super passionate about.

The WNBA this year has had their most successful year yet, and I think, certainly, we could look to him as a celebrity who’s helped with that. So I think it’ll be interesting to see how this impacts the discourse around women’s sports.

LAUREN GILGER: Right, because we’re seeing kind of a big moment for it, not just the WNBA, but we have the Women’s World Cup coming up next year. I will say, the WNBA in particular has been a little vitriolic of late.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Oh, yes.

LAUREN GILGER: A little less Ted Lasso.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: It really feels like that, and and any Mercury fan should know that because I think we’ve often been at the center of that controversy, particularly this summer when we had the flagrant foul against Alyssa Thomas after crashing into Caitlin Clark, this moment that just went viral, the [Sophie Cunningham] pointing memes.

And following that, then several members of Congress sent a letter to the WNBA commissioner about better protecting Caitlin Clark, about the kinds of physicality of the league. So there has been so much, I think as the audience has grown, discourse around so many politically polarized issues as they connect to the league, which is fair to say. I mean, there are intersections of incredibly important social issues with women’s sports.

And as much as that can be so powerful to get the opportunity to discuss, I think we need a nuanced discussion like I hope Ted Lasso will provide. And in the second episode, hey, they’ve already taken on feminism, so I don’t think they’re going to shy away.

LAUREN GILGER: All right, one one small preview there. Last quick question for you. So how do you think this new season of “Ted Lasso” might change the way we think about women’s sports, maybe shed some new light on it as, you know, it’s becoming very much in the spotlight in good and bad ways?

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Yes, yes. So the U.S. Women’s Soccer coach popularized the idea that men’s sports are cortisol and women’s sports are dopamine. And I think if we were going to say one thing about “Ted Lasso,” it’s a dopamine show. And I think that women’s sports lately, with the WNBA, sometimes haven’t, because of this sort of toxic discourse, hasn’t always felt like dopamine. So I hope that it brings that back, but also what it does what it does so well, which is human stories.

And I think as they tell the stories of these new women players on the team of the Lady Greyhounds and explore them in all of the intersecting issues, I think, hopefully, it will help us all better connect to human stories in women’s sports in day-to-day life, too.

LAUREN GILGER: You ended on an appropriately optimistic note, I think, Amanda, for a conversation about “Ted Lasso.”

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Now we’re cooking.

LAUREN GILGER: Amanda Kehrberg, Ph.D. student at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Amanda, thank you as always. We appreciate it.

AMANDA KEHRBERG: Thank you so much.