![]() Sharon (Sarah Niles) in episode 10 (“No Weddings and a Funeral”), he’s a raw and exposed nerve shuddering at every flicker of contact. By the time he finally acquiesces to having a real therapy session with Dr. Even Ted’s assistant coaches are struggling, with Beard (Brendan Hunt) caught in a self-loathing loop and Nate (Nick Mohammad) at a toxic crossroads of insecurity and performative masculinity that seems on a clear collision course to disaster.īut it’s Ted’s inability to outrun his past, let alone smooth over his present with a meticulous smile, that deepens the bruise of Season 2. Sweet Sam (an ever-confident Toheeb Jimoh) learns how to stand up for what he believes in, while superstar footballer Jamie (Phil Dunster) finds himself humbled in the face of potential obscurity and his deadbeat dad. The team’s former captain Roy (Brett Goldstein) tries to find his place in both retirement and a stable relationship with publicity manager Keeley (Juno Temple), who in turn is settling into a more adult version of her previous life. Rebecca asks herself what she truly wants in love and life for the first time in decades. Instead, it drills down into each character’s internal journeys, giving each ample room to feel their often overwhelming feelings in a way that scares them to death whether they want to admit it or not. Because unlike the first season, the second seems to feel no pressure to keep things moving. ![]() That both were added to accommodate Apple’s last minute season expansion order, and that the so-called “saccharine” Christmas episode falls right in line with the most classic of British TV traditions, didn’t especially matter. Some viewers, now watching the show weekly for the first time, found themselves impatient for the season to get to “the point” already, annoyed by the episodes’ shaggier run times, and/or confused by “extra” episodes like “Carol of the Bells” and “Beard After Dark” that didn’t advance the plot at all. Ditching the structure of the soccer season almost entirely, the second season of “Ted Lasso” wanders alongside its struggling characters on the way to urgent, deeply emotional revelations. But the second season, which premiered a year and many months of hype after the first, immediately obscured the more obvious sports arc in favor of just about every character going through their own personal crises. Here, a clear view to the end of “Ted Lasso” - or at least a defined trajectory for the series as a trilogy of sorts - was in sight. “So next year we get ourselves a promotion,” he says, “and then we come back to this league, and do something no one believes we could ever do: win the whole fucking thing.” And in its closing moments, as Ted and Rebecca try to process the fact that their club just got relegated to a lesser tier of British soccer, Ted even lays out what the rest of the series could look like. ![]() While the season twists some key conventions, such as Rebecca admitting her nefarious schemes only to have Ted immediately forgive her, it otherwise has an immediately understandable beginning, middle, and end for its characters and plotlines. Every episode fit together into the whole, a neat puzzle piece building to the final moments of the team becoming a family, Rebecca becoming a more honest version of herself, and Ted settling in to his new home for what seems like the long haul. Richmond, but of the team’s seemingly icy new owner Rebecca ( Hannah Waddingham) thawing as she realizes the full extent of her heartbreak. It’s also tightly plotted, mimicking the 1989 sports comedy “Major League” to tell not just the story of Ted bringing his feel-good optimism to A.F.C. In spite of this arc, and the fact that Ted’s team ends up losing its most crucial match right at the tail end, the first season of Apple TV Plus’ breakaway hit is more or less as cheery as his mustachioed smile. ![]()
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