Ted Lasso: The Richmond Way
Starring Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Jeremy Swift, Phil Dunster, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, Nick Mohammed, Juno Temple, Sarah Niles, Anthony Head, Toheeb Jimoh, Cristo Fernández, Kola Bokinni, Billy Harris, and James Lance.
SYNOPSIS:
If the 4K upgrade is important to you, then you’re probably one of the ideal customers for this new 4K Ultra HD box set of Apple TV+’s wonderful series, Ted Lasso. It’s the same setup as the previously issued Blu-ray set, with the same lack of bonus features, but if you haven’t taken the dive into this one on home video yet, why not do so in 4K?
I’m writing this the day after the horrific tragedy that took the lives of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. I suppose it’s fitting to be thinking about the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, because it’s a great way to take one’s mind off terrible news, the same way the show did when it premiered during the pandemic.
I’ve definitely become more cynical in my old age, but I can’t help but smile at the folksy charm of Ted Lasso (Jason Sudekis), an American college football coach lured to the UK to run a soccer (or football, as they say in Europe) team owned by Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham). She came into ownership of the team via a divorce, and she secretly hopes Ted will ruin AFC Richmond so her ex-husband is miserable.
Ah, to be wealthy enough to play a silly game like that. Of course, Ted and his assistant coach, Willis Beard (Brendan Hunt), manage to rally AFC Richmond’s players and turn them into a squad that makes a run up the Premier League standings in the third and final season.
The players are a bit like an adult soccer version of The Bad News Bears, including: Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), a no-nonsense veteran who later joins the club’s coaching staff; Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster), a gifted young player who’s also full of himself; Zava (Maximilian Osinski), another talented but odd player; Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh), an earnest, young Nigerian player; and so forth. (If you think Kent and Tartt kind of sound like the Crash Davis/Nuke Laloosh dynamic in Bull Durham, well, yeah, their relationship is pretty much like that.)
The characters orbiting the team include: Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), a model and Jamie’s girlfriend who later handles marketing and PR for the team before striking out on her own; Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed), an equipment manager who turns out to have a gift for soccer strategy; Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift), the timid and oh-so-very-British director of football operations; and Trent Crimm (James Lance), a reporter who gets a larger role in the third season as he works on a book about the club called The Richmond Way.
The series has a nice arc across its three seasons, as Ted and Coach Beard acclimate to a new country and a sport they don’t know very well (while Ted deals with his marriage falling apart and being thousands of miles from his son) and the rest of the characters go through their own journeys. Many of the character revelations are well-worn tropes, such as Jamie’s father being shown as an abusive asshole, but Ted is just so much fun to watch that it doesn’t really matter.
I was bummed when Ted Lasso ended, but I’ve come to appreciate the idea of letting a setup run its course and then coming in for a comfortable landing. (Let’s hope Apple’s latest series, Pluribus, can do the same; I’m hopeful.) I was honestly fine with the show ending, although I wouldn’t have minded a spin-off featuring Rebecca and Keeley—it wouldn’t have necessarily had to center around soccer.
However, earlier this year, two years after the finale, the announcement came that Ted Lasso would be returning for a fourth season, so we’ll see what Sudeikis and company have up their sleeves for more episodes. I’m still happy with the show’s bittersweet conclusion, so I hope the new episodes won’t just be an attempt to retread the same territory as before. You can’t step in the same stream twice, as the saying goes, so let’s see the characters on new adventures, even if soccer remains the backdrop.
If you’re a fan of the show too, then you’ve probably already purchased the Blu-ray edition of Ted Lasso: The Richmond Way, so this new 4K Ultra HD version is probably only worth the upgrade if you have a setup that really takes advantage of 4K. My understanding is that the video quality is pretty much the same here, just with the addition of Dolby Vision.
Each season has its own case, and you get eight discs containing the 34 episodes. Unfortunately, like the Blu-ray release, there are no bonus features found here, which is a bummer. The powers that be couldn’t round up Sudeikis and a few other members of the cast and production team to talk about a show that took the Internet by storm in the midst of a pandemic none of us had ever experienced?
Oh well. Maybe the inevitable box set with all four seasons will make up for it.
Brad Cook
