It’s payback time this week on Ted Lasso. Nate and Ted are due to face off after their acrimonious split at the end of last season. As usual, Ted doesn’t want to go negative. And, though Nate has unequivocally already gone negative, he feels bad about it.
Meanwhile, Keeley’s having second thoughts about Jamie and Shandy, Rebecca’s in an awkward position, an important financier shows up to the game, and Ted’s got the blues. Entitled “Big Week,” it’s a pretty solid episode of the biggest hit on Apple TV+, all things considered.
Ted Lasso recap: ‘Big Week’
Season 3, episode 4: Jamie Tartt (played by Phil Dunster) wakes at 4 a.m. to the sound of Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) knocking at his door. A few nights back, Jamie let slip to Roy that he wants to be a better player than AFC Richmond’s new star, Zava (Maximilian Osinski). Roy heard him and thought, rather than letting the guy wallow in his doubt and misery, he’d actually help out Jamie. Training starts now.
Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis), Jamie’s other coach, wakes up in bed with Florence “Sassy” Collins (Ellie Taylor). He suggests they date, but she says “absolutely not,” and explains that Ted’s a mess. He’s overly nice to people to cover up his own flaws. She says she was there (though in the opposite direction) a few years back when her marriage fell apart. Ted would need to get in control for her to consider a relationship, but frankly she doesn’t want to consider it. She likes things the way they are. (Been there, Ted. Now get over it.)
Ted tells Roy, Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) and Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) about the encounter. And though Roy wants no part of the discussion, Leslie and Beard let Ted know he’s not good at dealing with his emotions. After all, they’re playing West Ham this week, facing off against their old coach, Nate Shelley (Nick Mohammed), who abandoned Richmond (and hurt Ted deeply in the process).
Trouble for Ted and everyone in his orbit
Photo: Apple TV+
Barbara (Katy Wix), the new CFO of Keeley Jones’ (Juno Temple) PR company, comes in to tell her that their boss, Jack, is coming by to check on the company and their progress as Richmond’s PR firm. (It’s a surprise that Jack is a “she,” played by For All Mankind‘s Jodi Balfour, but, well we gotta credit her, so, sorry, spoiler alert.) Jack wants a box seat at the game against West Ham. Rebecca Walton (Hannah Waddingham), Richmond’s owner, agrees to let Keeley have it.
The team is sweating the West Ham match. And to make matters worse, somebody ripped up Ted’s “Believe” sign in the locker room to spook them. Ted, Beard, Roy and Trent Crimm (James Lance), the journalist shadowing the team, watch the security cam footage and discover Nate’s the evil-doer. They want to use it as fodder to gas up the team, but Ted’s wary, as always, of going negative.
Keeley sends Shandy Fine (Ambreen Razia), her old friend and assistant, to conduct new interviews with the team. Her idea, to do dating profile videos as ads, is producing odd results — partly because the team is so on edge about the West Ham game. Shandy asks Keeley if she’s cool if she tries to shtup Jamie, knowing that they used to date. Though Keeley says yes, she obviously feels some remorse, especially now that she and Roy are no longer an item.
Nate is sweating, too. He’s spent most of the build-up to the match trash-talking Ted and Richmond. Now he’s starting to feel guilty about it.
Loneliness, apologies and awkwardness
Ted’s in a funk the rest of the night. He tries to talk to Rebecca about it, who already heard from Sassy about Ted asking her out. However, Ted doesn’t fully come clean about the fact that his wife, Michelle (Andrea Anders), is now dating their marriage counselor (Mike O’Gorman). Ted’s really feeling his loneliness.
The next day, Ted runs into Nate in the elevator at West Ham’s stadium. He’s about to apologize to obnoxious West Ham owner Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head), who’s also Rebecca’s ex. But Nate gets on the elevator and interrupts him before he can. Ted at least knows that Nate feels bad, which is more than he knew a minute ago. But then Nate blanks him a few minutes later on the sidelines.
Keeley gets her period in the restroom at West Ham stadium. After a woman spots her a tampon, Keeley gets uncomfortably honest about her situation. She discovers a few minutes later that the woman she was so candid with is Jack, her boss. A moment of awkwardness follows, but they recover — and perhaps share a few seconds of flirtatious eye contact. Certainly that’s the vibe, but who knows?
I really want to win this one
Photo: Apple TV+
The West Ham game starts terribly. Nate’s trained his guys well, and they overwhelm Richmond from the beginning. They lead 2-0 at the half. A nervous Rebecca goes to tell Ted she believes in him, and to have fun, but her tone suggests a panic attack. While Ted is talking to Rebecca, Beard and Roy — clueless without him — show the team the video of Nate ruining the sign. Then they go out and play the second half like a street gang. They tackle and slide and beat the hell out of everyone on West Ham’s team.
The only one who doesn’t embarrass himself is Zava. Keeley senses that Jack is upset by the players’ display, which means she might start to wonder why she invested in Richmond to begin with. In the aftermath, Beard and Roy all but beg Ted to lash out at them for showing the video, but he doesn’t. Ted doesn’t give them the gift of his anger. He just destroys the footage of the sign destruction. Nate tries to apologize, but Ted’s gone by the time he goes looking for him.
Rebecca gets a win of a kind when she spies Rupert and another woman who isn’t the mother of his daughter. She doesn’t tell Bex (Keeley Hazell), the mother in question, but she does tell Rupert she knows, which makes her feel better about having the high ground.
Then Shandy messes up a big campaign in front of both Jack and Keeley, which rattles Keeley quite a bit. (This was, it has to be said, far too broadly telegraphed from the moment Shandy appeared on the show.)
And finally, Ted calls Michelle to chat about their failed marriage. He says exactly what’s on his mind: that he’s bummed that he’s dealing with things second-hand, and that she’s dating their marriage counselor.
How to turn a breakup into art
Mostly this was good stuff, but I have to say briefly that, while I can’t carbon date the writing of this episode, it is wild to watch this season of Ted Lasso and see his character on the receiving end of a cruel divorce after we watched Jason Sudeikis’ own very public divorce last year. I mean, Sudeikis seems to be doing fine, all things considered. He was at the White House a few weeks ago talking about mental health (which…), but he must know we’re all aware of what he’s doing here.
There are two ways to talk about your divorce in art. You can make it abstract and surreal, a la Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (one of the best films ever made, by one of the best directors who ever lived, so no shade about not hitting that high). Or you can be very literal about the whole thing, like Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story.
I know which one hits me harder. And I know which one winds up being more satisfying. Sudeikis and company aren’t out to make capital-A art — they’re out to make the kind of show that gets you invited to the White House. That’s fine. But you won’t catch me saying I don’t wish they’d aimed higher with Ted Lasso.
★★★☆☆
Watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV+
New episodes of Ted Lasso season three arrive every Wednesday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
