Jealousy and leaks fuel this week’s Ted Lasso [Apple TV+ recap]

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Brendan Hunt, Jason Sudeikis and Gus Turner in ★★★☆☆
Ted (played by Jason Sudeikis, center) gets to spend some quality time with his son, Henry (Gus Turner, right) and Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) this week.
Photo: Apple TV+

TV+ ReviewTed Lasso finds almost everyone in a rut this week. Keeley is a wreck after leaked footage of her reaches the internet, and it may have even worse consequences than she fears. Ted thinks his wife is going to get engaged to someone else — and he’s not handling it well.

The thornier-than-usual episode, entitled “We’ll Never Have Paris,” still comes with the usual gallon of sentimentality we expect from the most popular show on Apple TV+.

Ted Lasso recap: ‘We’ll Never Have Paris’

Season 3, episode 8: Ted (played Jason Sudeikis) should be on cloud nine. His team is doing phenomenally, thanks to the new playing strategy cooked up by him and AFC Richmond’s star player, Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster). Plus, Ted’s son Henry (Gus Turner)  is in town for the weekend.

He’s not, though. He’s in misery. Seems the reason Ted gets to enjoy a weekend with his boy is that his ex-wife Michelle (Andrea Anders) and her boyfriend/marriage counselor Jacob (Mike O’Gorman) are going to Paris. This can only mean one thing: Jacob is going to propose to her.

Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) and Trent Crimm (James Lance) try to comfort Ted by saying that it’s not a done deal, but that doesn’t help him much.

So Ted goes to team owner Rebecca Walton (Hannah Waddingham) and asks if she can help him hire a private detective to learn for sure whether it’s happening. She tries to disabuse him of the idea, too, but he’s too dead set to be talked out of it — at least until Rebecca reminds him that he’s letting the past get in the way of the present.

When Michelle returns, she doesn’t have an engagement ring on her finger, which gives Ted some hope.

Keeley’s big leak

Juno Temple in "Ted Lasso," now streaming on Apple TV+.
Keeley (played by Juno Temple) finds out why you should never send intimate pictures to anyone!
Photo: Apple TV+

Meanwhile, Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) also should be very happy. Her relationship with Jack (Jodi Balfour) is going great, and the team is doing well, and that makes her PR firm look good.

But then something catastrophic happens. An old erotic video Keeley sent to a boyfriend leaks online. She’s devastated to think her friends and family might see it. And Jack doesn’t help things by giving her a very legal-sounding note of apology to post on social media.

Keeley doesn’t want to accept responsibility for something she shouldn’t be embarrassed about. But the trouble doesn’t stop there. Jack cancels a party after the leak, reasoning out loud that Keeley wouldn’t want to be someplace with cameras and press while still stinging from the leak.

Keeley thinks it’s actually because Jack’s embarrassed to be seen with her. She confirms this the following day when they run into an old university friend of Jack’s, and Jack describes Keeley as a “friend.” That doesn’t sound like the act of a loving partner, but rather someone trying to cover up something.

That night, Keeley confronts Jack. She reacts badly and leaves in a huff after Keeley refuses to apologize for having made and sent the video in the first place. Then Jamie comes over to apologize to her. His email got hacked, which led to the video going viral. Keeley forgives him and hugs him.

Nate has his own situations to deal with

Elsewhere, Nate (Nick Mohammed) is sweating his relationship with Jade (Edyta Budnik). It’s going very well, but he wants badly for them to start using labels. And of course, he doesn’t come out and say so.

He pretends he’s cool with them being casual, but it’s tearing him up inside. He tries to talk to some of the guys at his football club about it, like he used to do with Ted and Beard back at Richmond. It goes disastrously. As if he needed yet another reminder that life without Ted and Beard is complicated, they show up at his game that day because Henry wants to see a soccer match.

Their appearance makes headlines. Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head) tells Nate he will not let Ted back into the stadium unless it’s for game days, but Nate is secretly very happy Ted came out. He’s also thrilled that Henry remembered who he was and tried to say hello to him. Seeing Nate smile at the headlines later prompts Jade to say that she thinks of him as her boyfriend, which finally allows Nate to relax.

City of alrights

Nick Mohammed in "Ted Lasso," now streaming on Apple TV+.
Nate (played by Nick Mohammed) gets a reminder of how good he had it at AFC Richmond.
Photo: Apple TV+

The Jack storyline made me kind of furious this week. I don’t know that I buy that Jack would have this bizarro, regressive conservative streak that would not have made its presence known in other ways. Seems like a too-convenient way to get Jack out of the picture, and Keeley back to being caught between Jamie and Roy. Which begs the question: What was the point of Jack to begin with, if she is indeed just a cul-de-sac? A find it a little infuriating.

Ted’s jealousy is also very unmoving. I spend a half-hour every week with the guy, and I don’t think his wife should take him back or whatever he wants to happen. He’s annoying! And needy. He just covers it all up with bad puns and folksy aphorisms.

Worse yet, he and Beard get the most obnoxious emotional beat of this week’s episode when they sing along to “Hey Jude” as some busker plays the song outside a pub. That’s just assaulting the viewer with preciousness. Ted Lasso truly cannot help itself.

Still, the Nate story arc was good — a better use of a low-stakes situation. And Nick Mohammed beautifully underplays Nate’s reactions to the barrage of news items about Ted and Beard’s appearance at his team’s game. That stuff saved an otherwise whatever episode.

★★★☆☆

Watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV+

New episodes of Ted Lasso season three arrive every Friday on Apple TV+.

Rated: TV-MA

Watch on: Apple TV+

Get it 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.

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