What We Already Know About ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 3
Be a Goldfish, Sam
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Unlike AFC Richmond’s ascent, Ted Lasso is no underdog story. As the sports comedy’s first season charmed viewers in Season 1, Apple TV+ renewed the show for a second season in August 2020 — and then ordered a third season just two months later.
And those early votes of confidence came months before Ted Lasso took the 73rd Primetime Emmy Awards by storm, earning 20 nominations and netting major wins in the comedy categories.
Now that Season 2 has come and gone — and upset the power balance in the fictional Richmond — we’ve rounded up some Premier-level scoop about the upcoming third season.
Season 3 may be the final outing for Ted Lasso.
Executive producer Bill Lawrence told Deadline in October that he and his colleagues pitched Ted Lasso as a three-season show — but he also said the show might surpass that endpoint.
“I would probably stay clean and say that even if Ted Lasso goes on, the story the writing staff has been telling had a beginning, middle and end for the first three seasons,” he said. “And then it might veer off from that.”
The cast, writers, and producers got raises for the third season.
Last September, The Hollywood Reporter cited sources who said the writers, producers, and cast — “down to the last player on Richmond’s roster”—renegotiated their contracts with Warner Bros. Television for Season 3.
As part of those contract renegotiations, the salary for Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) rose from $250,000–$300,000 per episode to $1 million per episode, while Hannah Waddingham (Rebecca Welton), Brett Goldstein (Roy Kent), Juno Temple (Keeley Jones), and Brendan Hunt (Coach Beard) went from $50,000–$75,000 to $125,000–$150,000 per episode, the sources said.
Dr. Sharon Fieldstone and Trent Crimm are coming back.
The end of Season 2 saw sports psychologist Sharon Fieldstone (Sarah Niles) end her time with AFC Richmond and journalist Trent Crimm (James Lance) lose his job with The Independent. (If you recall, the gray-maned journalist revealed to Ted that his source on the panic-attack story was none other than Richmond’s then-assistant coach Nathan Shelley, played by Nick Mohammed.)
But Lawrence told Deadline that both of those scene-stealing characters will have “significant roles” in Season 3.
Season 3 will have 12 episodes, like Season 2.
Ted Lasso’s first season boasted 10 episodes, and Season 2 was initially slated for the same count, but Apple asked the team for two more episodes during production on that second season, as Hunt told TVLine in September.
Backstage at the Emmys later that month — after Ted Lasso won Outstanding Comedy Series and the prizes for lead comedy actor and supporting comedy actress and actor — Sudeikis told reporters that Season 3 will also have 12 episodes.
“They, being Apple, asked for 12 episodes and this time, ahead of time,” he said, per Deadline. “So, we’ll be doing 12 episodes as of now.”
Ted Lasso now has a licensing deal with the Premier League.
The Athletic reported in October that the Ted Lasso producers had inked a licensing deal worth up to £500,000 (around $680,000 USD) with the Premier League. The deal allows the show to use archive footage, Premier League logos, club kits, and the league trophy, the site explained.
The story might skip two months into the future.
Hunt indicated in a recent TVLine interview that Season 3 will take up action at the start of the next football season — two months after Season 2 left off — and will feature two showdowns between AFC Richmond and West Ham, the team that Nathan now coaches.
“We’ve never gone from the start of a season, so perhaps that’s something we want to get to,” Hunt said. “And just by dint of how the schedule works in the English Premier League, we will play West Ham twice — home and away, because that’s how it goes.”
Season 3 might premiere later in the year than past seasons.
Hunt also told TVLine that the Season 3 scripts are finished and the new episodes are in pre-production, but he added that a “wrinkle” might delay the filming of the football scenes — and thus might prevent Season 3 from premiering in July or August like Seasons 1 and 2 did.
“We are definitely starting later this year than in Season 2, that’s for sure,” he added. “So I would be surprised if our delivery dates were the same. That’s above my pay grade; I don’t know for sure. But I do have a vague understanding of the limits of this dimension we call time, and I would say it seems pretty unlikely that we would [premiere] as early this year.”
Last month, however, Hunt signaled the start of Season 3 production, posting an Instagram photo of himself and Sudeikis boarding a private plane. “Here we go,” he captioned the pic.
Ted Lasso, Seasons 1 & 2 current streaming, Apple TV
