Ted Lasso is back. Apple TV+’s premier program, both thanks to its popularity and ties to the famed English soccer league, has one of television’s most unlikely stories, as it was birthed from a series of NBC Sports television commercials that featured Jason Sudekis’s Ted Lasso adjusting to European football. Beyond the wild origins for the show’s concept, Ted Lasso was commissioned by Apple TV+ in October 2019, mere weeks before the tech giant’s streaming service officially launched. Despite the obstacles, Ted Lasso soared to 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and was in demand more than 27 times the average television series in the United States (per Parrot Analytics).
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Speaking with ComicBook.com, Ted Lasso star and co-creator Brendan Hunt joked that they anticipated stronger numbers for the show.
“We thought it would be bigger. We thought that we’d be advertising on the Space Station by now, so a little disappointed. No, we had no idea at all!” Hunt said. “I mean, you hope to even just get a second season, much less have a show that’s this well received, especially when the show was going out on a streaming service that didn’t exist [at the time]. So this is bonkers.”
Among the unexpected things was not just the positive response to the show, but how much viewers valued having Ted Lasso in their lives. Many champion the program as their go-to comfort show, which Hunt explains was not necessarily a hard-set goal when Ted Lasso was first being developed.
“It’s under the heading of things we can’t control really. People having such reactions to it and these reactions taking the life of its own in this way, and it’s becoming people’s comfort show,” Hunt continued. “It’s just cool. That was not the goal by any means, we weren’t trying to be a people’s comfort show. We weren’t trying to be the show that’s a hug. We weren’t trying to get people through the pandemic. We just wanted to make a funny show that people would like and for people to have taken to it this way is something we’re just super grateful for.”
Since Ted Lasso began airing in Summer 2020, Hunt and company have seen the show’s overall arc as a three-season story. Now that they’ve reached that third season, Hunt admits that he does not know what the future holds, but did admit their last day on set “felt like graduation.”
“Part of not knowing [what’s next] means it’s possible that it is the end. We at the very least know we’re going to be taking some time off from this thing before we figure out what happens next,” Hunt explained. “That last day definitely felt like graduation and everyone getting ready to leave campus and will we see each other again and such. I mean that in the most wonderful way. It was very sentimental. And them Brits, they’re not that sentimental, but ours were.”
Ted Lasso airs new episodes every Wednesday on Apple TV+.
