Over the course of the last few months, Apple TV+‘s Ted Lasso, from Scrubs and Spin City creator Bill Lawrence, has been an unqualified success. Renewed for a second season almost immediately after the series launched, Ted Lasso got a third season, too — before season two even had a chance to start airing. It seems, though, that the series will not last past the episodes it already has ordered. Ted Lasso, which stars Jason Sudeikis as an American college football coach recruited to come and try to save a beleaguered English Premier League (soccer) team, is likely to end after three seasons because Sudeikis has a family, and likely will not want to be spending half his years an ocean apart from his kids.
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While it has not yet been widely reported, Lawrence said as much on an early December episode of Fake Doctors, Real Friends, a Scrubs rewatch podcast hosted by series stars Zach Braff and Donald Faison. During a conversation about the state of The Mandalorian, Lawrence was opining on the difficulty of making a second season to a show where everyone loved the first season. When asked whether he was concerned about that on Ted Lasso, he said it was less of an issue on a series that is designed as finite.
“I think that ours is a little different because Jason, as he’s kind of mapping it out, it’s a three-season show,” Lawrence explained. “So…super-fans know that [The Mandalorian is] connecting tissue in the Star Wars universe, and for us, everybody knows that they get an end to this story in the third season.”
While Braff jokingly made a big deal of the show’s exclusive news, and asked media outlets to shout them out if they ran the story, so far the news appears to really only have made it to Ted Lasso‘s Wikipedia page, and into glancing mentions in one or two entertainment stories covering other aspects of Scrubs.
“Ted Lasso is a three-season show. After the third season, I will desperately try to get Mr. Sudeikis to do a…” Lawrence started, and then he stopped to rephrase. “The only way I think a fourth season of Ted Lasso exists would be if TL went and coached a soccer team that played about a block from Jason’s house in real life, you know what I mean? He’s got young kids.”
While there is no firm start date yet for filming, it is expected that Ted Lasso‘s second season will be streaming in late 2021 or early 2022 on Apple TV+.
