Jason Sudeikis Claps Back at all the ‘Ted Lasso’ Season Three Haters

“Be curious, not judgmental” is easy advice to dole out to your critics and a much harder motto to embrace when your ex gets a new boyfriend. 

That, in essence, is the main issue with the title character in Ted Lasso Season Three, a third and possibly final act to the series-length adaptation of an NBC soccer commercial that had previously captured the hearts and minds of a mid-pandemic America that was desperately in need of thoughtful, feel-good comedy. In Season Three, Ted Lasso saw a drop-off from universal acclaim to simply mostly positive reviews, as fans and critics alike cringed at Ted’s weird divorce drama and eventual reunion with his ex-wife who spent most of the season banging their marriage counselor.

Ted Lasso star and creator Jason Sudeikis has strong feelings on the subject of his show’s plummet from 98 percent on the Tomatometer to a measly 87, and, in Jeremy Egner’s recently released oral history of the show, Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way Into Our Hearts, Sudeikis unleashed them with a level of passive aggression we didn’t think was possible from Kansas’ foremost shortbread baker.

“Some people want to judge — they don’t want to be curious,” Sudeikis said of the season’s critics in the book — and some people just didn’t want to watch a show about his breakup.

“Much like live theater, the show, especially Season Three, was asking the audience to be an active participant,” Sudeikis explained. “Some people want to do that, some people don’t.” Sudeikis seemed to imply that Ted Lasso’s sharp tonal change from a feel-good show about a complicated but upbeat football coach to the uncomfortable, chaotic story of a divorced stalker was designed to separate the curious from the judgmental. 

“I’ll never understand people who will go on talking about something so brazenly that they, in my opinion, clearly don’t understand,” Sudeikis said of the Season Three naysayers. “And God bless ’em for it; it’s not their fault. They don’t have imaginations and they’re not open to the experience of what it’s like to have one.”

While unsatisfied fans felt that Ted Lasso Season Three weakened some of the characters (namely, Ted) by turning them erratic and unrelatable, Sudeikis disagreed. “Everybody’s in better shape than when they started,” he said of the show's current ending. “Like a good Boy or Girl Scout at a campsite, we left it better than we found it. And if you don’t see that in that show, then I don’t know what show you’re watching.”

Well, when Ted hired a private investigator to follow his ex-wife across Europe to make sure she didn’t marry their old therapist, we didn’t know what show we were watching, either.