Ted Lasso is not normal television. At least, it hasn’t been since season 1. 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Twin Peaks: The Return ain’t exactly normal television, either. It’s good to push boundaries, even break them when you’ve got genuine narrative and aesthetic innovation in mind. Conversely, some of the most straight-ahead, classically constructed episodic television is also some of the medium’s best work. 

The unfortunate part about Ted Lasso after Season 1 is that it isn’t normal, but thinks that it is. Latter-season episodes will cut from A plot to B plot to C plot and back again, setting up a mild obstacle for the characters to overcome, and overcome it they do. There just happens to be approximately 20-30 minutes of material in each episode that deflates all sense of plot thrust and comedic rhythm. It’s “this meeting could have been an e-mail” television.

Lo and behold, Season 4 Episode 7, “Yes & Baby,” looks and feels like a normal television episode! It has been the shortest episode since Ted and the gang returned to England. You can feel a notable difference in how each scene and plot thread is paced. Is it any good? Not really. But we must still celebrate the small victories.

One of those victories is the opening montage. Co-showrunners Jason Sudeikis and Jack Burditt are in some small part paying back the promise of Episodes 2 and 3, where the material realities of life as a lower-division women’s footballer get some critical shading. Lizzie (Faye Marsay) has to bring her son to practice last-minute when her kids’ father doesn’t show up to take him. Boots (Jude Mack) has to run to practice because her busted Land Rover has stalled out again. Twins Niamh and Siobhan (Aisling Sharkey & Rex Hayes) get a notice that their landlord is increasing the rent to potentially unaffordable levels. Gemma (Abbie Hern) gets put up for a prestigious law internship by her professor, which will conflict with the time she is spending with the club. Shannon (Shannon Hayes) moonlights as a food delivery worker, and is recognized by a baffled Richmond supporter. “You play for Richmond and you also deliver food?” he asks. “Welcome to second-division women’s football,” Shannon responds, leading the man to say what someone in every part of this montage concludes with:

Call me biased (I do host a women’s soccer podcast, after all), but these moments of players’ day-to-day lives, and the sacrifices made to keep playing, have been the most compelling parts of the season to date. Their extended absences have only served to frustrate. What’s more, the players have been generally reduced to tropes, their depths left largely unexplored. By this point in Season 1, the audience had come to know Roy, Jamie, and Sam as people, not caricatures. The perceived need by Sudeikis and Burditt to service anodyne plots for legacy characters leaves little space to dig into Gemma, Lizze, and Boots with the same level of care that the men’s players were offered in Season 1. 

Thanks to some newfound straightforward sitcom structure, the side plots don’t grind things to a halt, even if the material is fairly weak tea. It’s nice that Dr. Erin Beaumont (Laura Haddock) does the chivalrous thing and steps aside for Roy and Keeley to find their way back to each other, but that’s not before Roy gives a full therapy-speak monologue about how he “sees” her, and how wonderful it’s been for her to “see” him. We knew this was where their relationship would end up, but Sudeikis et al. still had to drag it out far past its sell-by date, and then tag it with a Lasso-ism for good measure. 

Rebecca isn’t stuck on the creepy Matthijs drama for now, and instead we get a very sitcom-y, labyrinthine reason for Zelda (Tracey Ullman) to smoke out an unscrupulous agent trying to get more money for Roy and Dani Rojas in their next contracts. The whole thing is largely an excuse for Ullman to do a trademark ridiculous accent (Chicago, in this case), and it’s all tied up in a too-tidy Lasso-esque bow. It at least has the decency to move itself along, and gives the show an official reason for Zelda to be around so much: she’s coming onboard as Richmond’s special advisor. 

Ted, meanwhile, needs to work up the courage to complete his dating profile, and Keeley is the only character without anything else the writers gave her to do just the right person to help him. This is also an excuse for Ted to turn old-time gag man, throwing out humorous responses to each of the app’s profile questions. 

Again, there’s not much meat on the bone here. But it has the general shape and contours of a sitcom C plot, and that’s not nothing. 

These various elements are not where the true sin of the episode lies. As Ted once appropriated, it’s the hope that kills you. Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds) has lived in that space of dashed hope, a character who initially promised real emotional substance, only to collapse into an incoherent, Nate-shaped puddle. This week, Alice is going to say “yes” to life, which a low-key neurodiverse-coded person like her would take literally. 

Let the sitcom hijinks begin! Gemma needs to be late for practice thanks to her law internship interview. Alice immediately approves it. Lizzie needs to keep her younger son at the training ground for the day, and Alice gives a swift affirmative. Boots wants to train barefoot. You got it, keeper! Mady wants to wear a blindfold to “sense the ball without having to see it.” Why not? 

Ted and Beard then deliver the two words more misused in more comedic contexts than any others in the last 30 years: “yes and.” That’s right, Alice is about to have a major psychological breakthrough thanks to the healing powers of improv! She immediately grasps Elaine May’s 70-year-old concept of building on a person’s idea and making something new, which will then make the entire group’s work stronger. Only, Alice seems to suddenly be able to control her emotions, clarify her requests, and become a firm but caring coach all because of something she could have read on the back of a Del Close manual. Heavens protect us. 

Sudeikis, co-creator/co-star/writer/producer Brendan Hunt, and co-creator/writer/producer Joe Kelly all did improv together as young men in the late 1990s and 2000s, so it’s not a leap for them to use improv as a major plot device. The insidiousness of the format’s cult-like hold on so many comedy actors can be seen in their belief that Alice could become a better person so quickly after embracing improv’s central tenet. That, or they couldn’t think of another way to usher her emotional growth along. 

No matter. Alice is the full package as coach and person now. Gemma and the rest of the players quickly jump on board the Alice Express, once again ignoring what happened literally at the end of last week’s episode, when Alice snapped at Gemma for telling the players about her belief that they didn’t like her. Not once has anyone’s response to Alice been consistent or understandable from episode to episode. It’s maddening.

The long arm of the Harold hasn’t closed its fist around us completely yet. No, we must save that for the return of the “BELIEVE” sign, remade by Ted’s ex-wife Michelle in episode 6. Sudeikis and co. plant the seeds early that something transformative will occur with the sign at the beginning of the episode, as nobody seems to like it hanging in the coach’s office. Ted even says it’s “a little corny,” which is like Ed Gein saying his lampshades were a little much. Could Ted be changing his entire philosophy?

Of course not, silly! The show just needs to deliver its characters from one state of mind to another for the big climax, as crushing to one’s spirit as one could ask for. Alice moves the sign to the locker room, which prompts players to pepper Ted with criticism. Don’t the men have the exact same sign? Why are we getting their hand-me-downs? Plus, we’ve done enough believing. That’s why we’re here in the first place! Belief doesn’t find you childcare, or buy you a new car, or keep the rent low, or pay you enough to quit law school. 

Once again, the show is leaning into the inherent contradiction in the show’s ethos as it relates to the reality of women’s football. There’s energy in the show in those 90 seconds when the players push back. A glimmer of real conflict tiptoes up to the line of a genuine reckoning with the show’s own legacy, and its attempts to shoehorn the women’s game into it. Ted Lasso, for those 90 beautiful seconds, grows teeth.  

And then Alice “yes and”’s the player’s complaints, slapping a Post-It note to the sign’s lower right corner: “And Win.” Marcus Mumford’s treacly score drops in, the players’ eyes widen at the profundity of it all, and they start chanting their new mantra, ready to show the league what they’re made of 

“Locker room material” is a common refrain in sports for things that are supposed to get the players focused on a common foe, whether it’s journalists denigrating their performances or another team talking smack. “Believe and win” sort of fulfills that brief, I guess. But have the team not been winning? All we know about their quality is that they lost to an infinitely better team in the FA Cup, and that they’ve won a few and lost a few in the league. Maybe they need to believe that they can win more. 

A slogan like “believe and win” is still as vague and abstract as simply “Believe,” though. It just has a couple of extra words. Perhaps the St. Crispin’s Day speech is too high a bar to hold for such entreaties to battle, but are you ready to run through a wall after hearing “Believe and win”? I’m not. 

Ted Lasso has always been a show that gestures toward real, specific components of human psychology and sense of community, only to pull the rug back and rest on mushy platitudes. “Believe and win” is so galling because the rug that they are pulling back has more significant consequences than almost anything the show has put forth up to now. Women’s footballers’ very professional existences never stop hanging in the balance, and the show clearly knows that. Sudeikis and the writers can’t stop themselves from pivoting away from a real confrontation with that balance every time they’ve raised it this season. 

That is a real shame, because this season is already a massive hit, and may expose a lot of people to women’s soccer for the first time. They’ll absorb some of the issues these players actually face, but won’t be driven to do something about it (namely, watch games in person and on TV), because the show insists that belief will let you win. 

Yes, and the opportunity lost makes one want to tear one’s hair out.  

GAME NOTES

• What is the point of Beard anymore? He’s not funny, he’s not interesting, and he’s not substantial. All the writers have is a sprinkling of ex-girlfriend drama and midlife crisis. Snooze. 

• I adore “Unpretty” by TLC, and its use in the opening montage continues the show’s run of under-appreciated 1990s bangers. It is a bit strange to pair lyrics about the inner torture of male-driven standards of female beauty with the problems the characters face, none of which involve physical appearance.

• Charlotte Riley reappears as the stage manager Ted encountered in episode 5. He doesn’t bother finishing the app profile, because he wants to ask her out. The catch is that she’s seeing someone, but would definitely go out with him if she weren’t. Yay, Ted! Your whole vibe screams “no sex before marriage” but somehow you’ve been able to have casual flings for years while unable to actually go on a date. Sure, bud. 

Evan Davis is a contributing writer to Decider. He hosts Expected Own Goals, a podcast about women’s soccer.