Ted Lasso Season 4 Is Badly Failing Its Key Female Characters
by Ben Pearson · /FilmAdd SlashFilm on Google:
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This article contains spoilers for "Ted Lasso" Season 4, Episode 6, "Don't Jump Around Much Anymore."
"Ted Lasso" means a lot to a lot of people. Thanks to its (initially) well-drawn characters and good-natured sensibility, it was a balm in the early days of the pandemic. I even wrote about it as one of the things that kept me sane in 2020. But as that sensibility started to curdle in Season 2, the series experienced a drastic drop in quality, and by the time the Season 3 finale — thought at the time to be the series finale — came around, some of my colleagues and I felt foolish for ever liking the show in the first place.
Years later, the resurrected Season 4 has been a borderline trainwreck so far. The narrative engine of the season is that Ted (Jason Sudeikis) returns to London to coach the first AFC Richmond women's football team, which ostensibly gives the show new avenues to explore, including the systemic disadvantages women experience in professional sports compared to their male counterparts. But despite the season's shift to focus on women, nowhere has its disappointing direction been more evident than in the way "Ted Lasso" has treated its primary female characters, Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) and Keeley (Juno Temple).
Rebecca has regressed to the point of parody
Over the course of three seasons, Rebecca grew into someone who could handle any obstacle in her path. So naturally, Season 4 begins with an extended bit about how she's so psychotic for barbecue that she can't take a bite without spilling sauce all over herself. What? OK, fine — a swing and a miss, but since that (thankfully) only lasted one episode, let's look past it.
Back in London, Rebecca is dressed down by assistant coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds) for giving Ted the head coaching job without considering a woman for the position. This sends Rebecca into a defensive spiral of overly performative feminism that lasts for multiple episodes and — I cannot stress this enough — is painful to watch. The situation is forced, her reaction makes little sense given what we know of the character, and worst of all, the jokes aren't funny. Strike 2.
Then there's her dynamic with Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn). I suspect Rebecca's behavior here is an attempt to humanize the character, but this entire subplot doesn't work for me, either. We're meant to believe that the supremely competent and confident Rebecca Welton can't simultaneously hold down a relationship and maintain her job duties? Maybe I'd buy that from Season 1 Rebecca, but by the time the show "concluded" in Season 3, the writers had done so much work to build her up that it strains credulity to now watch her stumble so drastically.
By Episode 6, the Rebecca/Matthijs relationship has deteriorated to the point that she's trying to track his location on her phone. Women be crazy, amirite? It doesn't matter that the two characters ultimately reconnect by the episode's end — no schmaltzy rendition of "Auld Lang Syne" is going to make me forget how this show has done her so incredibly dirty.
The Keeley plotline isn't faring well, either
Meanwhile, after Keeley ended Season 3 as the head of her own public relations company, she's apparently given up that dream (at least as far as we see on screen) to help launch the Lady Greyhounds. Bizarrely, though, Rebecca and Higgins (Jeremy Swift) spent a considerable portion of this season so far treating her like a child who can't handle the truth.
And after Season 3 concluded with Keeley throwing Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) and Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) out of her house and choosing herself instead of picking one of them as a romantic partner, it feels like a huge backslide for the character to be pining over Roy so dramatically here. The show clearly views the Keeley/Roy relationship as an epic, star-crossed romance, but it's frustrating to see Keely devolve from making a healthy, adult decision to feeling as if she has no agency in her own personal life.
The show's fumbling of these storylines is especially odd because the new women's team members and the dynamics those characters have with each other have been some of the best components of the season so far. (Well, mostly — the subplot involving the players forming cliques felt obnoxiously gendered.) But when those predominantly interesting storylines butt up against Rebecca/Matthijs or Keeley/Roy, it makes the show's weaknesses with its primary female characters all the more glaring.
The Alice plotline isn't ideal, but at least it's fresh
Elsewhere, Coach Alice Chilton's main personality trait being "she's a b*tch" isn't exactly ideal, and watching her have yet another blow-up with Gemma (Abbie Hern) in the closing minutes of Episode 6 after the episode spent so much time getting Alice to loosen up is utterly exasperating. (Women be catty, amirite?) But at the very least, she's a new character, and we're in the middle of a designed character arc that hasn't fully unfolded yet.
Unfortunately for Rebecca and Keeley, they reached the end of their character arcs at the end of Season 3, since that was supposed to be the end of the series. But since Apple TV presumably paid Jason Sudeikis a lot of money to bring the show back (it's still Apple's biggest hit), the writers have to give those characters something to do. It's just a shame that they're struggling so mightily to do right by them.
"Ted Lasso" Season 4 is rolling out weekly on Apple TV.