Is ‘Ted Lasso’ the best or most dreadful show on TV?

One joy of the World Cup this summer was watching foreigners from all over the world unexpectedly fall in love with America. Not our opaque constitutional amendments or our Craftsman architecture but our Costcos, our Waffle Houses, our tailgate parties with portable hibachi grills. I don’t care what state of the union you’re from, watching TikToks of Belgian tourists trying to cram their suitcases full of ranch dressing so they can share its blessings with the continent of Europe is a patriotic experience.

The first episode of “Ted Lasso’s” long-anticipated return taps into this particular euphoria. The British executives of soccer team AFC Richmond - Rebecca, Keeley, Higgins - have descended upon the Kansas City area to recruit their former coach to head a new women’s team. Ted (Jason Sudeikis) turns them down; he left England three years ago to spend more time with his son.

But before the trio departs, glamazon owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) discovers barbecue, worrywart moneyman Higgins (Jeremy Swift) becomes a baseball fan, sunny marketing exec Keeley (Juno Temple) shops local. They are bowled over by our portion sizes, befuddled by our friendliness. They came, they saw, they upsized.

“This is a see-you-later hug,” Keeley promises as she bids farewell to Ted. “My goodbye hugs last for days.”

I suppose it would be a spoiler alert to say what happens next, but if somebody didn’t change their mind we wouldn’t have much of a revival, would we? Into the suitcase, Ted, you exceptional mascot for the land of the free refills; you affable, ambulatory bottle of ranch.

Is all of this heartwarming? Or is it a different kind of warming, like when you put off unpacking your luggage after an overseas trip, and three years pass, and all that’s left is the curdle of buttermilk powder and chives?

Before we get to those questions, an acknowledgment that “Ted Lasso” has become such a cultural phenomenon that a review, or even an introduction, feels a little silly.

But since it’s been a little while: “Lasso” is an Apple TV show that first arrived during the pandemic of 2020 when we needed it most. Corn-fed and heartfelt, it followed the journey of an American football coach unexpectedly tapped to lead an English football team. Richmond’s owner was a jilted ex-wife who secretly planned for Ted to fail and tank the team her husband loved.

But Ted Lasso is unsinkable. The kind of person who sees every challenge as an opportunity and every stranger as a friend unmet. In a stabler historical timeline, Ted, who sports an anachronistic mustache and a dorky visor, might have been a weirdo supporting character, Ned Flanders in the flesh. In the dark days of 2020, he became a proper hero: a beacon of everything we could and should be, if only we would speak in a flat Kansan accent and treat one another well.

Over the show’s original three-season run, the never-ending think pieces admittedly got cultlike and strange, but they weren’t wrong. Ted was a refreshing example of healthy masculinity: strong, reliable, persevering, full of integrity. The footballers of AFC Richmond were competitive, athletic and occasionally cads, but they were also decent and loyal, showing up unprompted to help clean up a Nigerian teammate’s restaurant after an anti-immigrant attack.

Do grown men typically choose “pillow fight” for their one free night in Amsterdam? Escapist science fiction comes in many forms.

“Ted Lasso” became a meditation on, oh, lots of things. What it meant to be a modern man. What it meant to be an American. What it meant to upend audience expectations, too: In the second season Ted has a mild breakdown when it turns out all that positivity he’s pushing into the world sometimes came at great personal cost. You can bake only so many rounds of conciliatory shortbread before you start to wonder whether anyone is going to notice that you’re hangry, too.

Or, maybe the show was terrible.

Because the other thing to acknowledge when writing a review is that some people absolutely hated it. The simplicity and earnestness of “Ted Lasso” had a way of scrambling people’s brains. Was it better than it seemed? Worse? Was there a joke you were missing at a higher level, or was face value the only value, all roads leading back to: Be excellent to one another, and you’ll soon become league champions.

When I mentioned to friends that I had, in my possession, the first four episodes of the new “Ted Lasso,” half of them tried to finagle an invitation to watch along with me (which, by the way, I think is a great idea - do you want to watch early TV with me? Let’s figure out how to do this), and the other half recoiled in nausea.

The show was saccharine, they said. Reductive. Even the original conceit - former wife sabotaging her husband’s sports team - was basically a redux of “Major League,” the 1989 Charlie Sheen masterpiece in which the bitchy, statuesque, I-inherited-this-from-my-husband owner of the Cleveland baseball team tries to wreck the Indians so she can move them to Miami.

The cultural critic whose opinion I respect more than anyone’s told me that “Ted Lasso” is the show that nearly broke him. It made him question everything he thought he knew about television. When he watched early episodes before the 2020 premiere, he thought the show was a banal nothingburger, expected and twice-baked. Not worth comment.

So when it turned out everyone thought it was worth comment, what did that say about his taste? Perhaps he no longer had his finger on the pulse of culture.

Or perhaps he simply wanted more from culture. Sometimes we have to consider that what we think we want from a television show (we want to BELIEVE) is not necessarily what we should have. Sometimes it’s just something gloppy and tasty that goes great with celery but tragically contains macros no dietitian could love.

If you’re still here, you might be wondering whether we’re actually going to get around to talking about the new episodes.

So yes, here we are again, in a cheerful, picturesque, red-telephone-booth version of England. Ted is back, and so is much of the original series’s main cast. The oddball male football players have been replaced by a roundup of oddball female ones, including a dour assistant coach (Tanya Reynolds), a set of competitive ginger twins and a potentially psychopathic goalie.

Whereas the original series featured players who were underdogs because they were underdogs, in the revival the talented players are underdogs mostly because they are women. As a result, the show often becomes a meditation on the indignities of female sports: There’s no budget for a decent locker room. There’s no media attention for a splashy opening game. The fan base ranges from overtly hostile at worst to well-meaning but clueless at best. “The Lady Greyhounds,” a grumbly Roy - Yes! Brett Goldstein is also back! - corrects his niece, when she refers to the new women’s team as, simply, “Richmond.”

Women athletes are talented but underpaid is a concept you are unfamiliar with, though, only if you’ve been sleeping through the era of Caitlin Clark. Nobody needs to be bonked on the head with this. The fourth season shines when it realizes that feminism sometimes plays best on-screen when it’s a little more pointed, and a little more willing to acknowledge complexities. My favorite plotline in the early episodes is kicked off by a star player announcing her pregnancy. The coaches assure her they care only about her health and happiness, and then as soon as she’s out of the room they unleash an epic “F—-!”

Health and happiness, blah blah blah, but what about the starting lineup?

For the most part, the show hits all of its original pleasure centers, from the infectious soundtrack to the abiding sense that the audience is in safe hands: no jump scares, no unendurable torment, nobody hurting anybody else on purpose. The scenery is gorgeous, the soccer is fun.

My husband announced that he felt no need to watch any of the new season, then he heard me cue it up in the living room and announced within two minutes that he was hooked. It’s that kind of show. The kind where you’re immediately at home, where all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. And also because it’s “Ted Lasso,” also swell.

Look, I think you should watch “Ted Lasso.” This recommendation should come as a surprise to nobody. I can’t go five columns without mentioning that I’m from the Midwest. The rest of the world is simply not ready to hear about the things we put ranch dressing on. You would need a couple of years to train up. If you’re thinking “pizza crust,” you’re barely thinking at all.

Watching the new episodes, three years after having said goodbye to the old ones, I could tell that, empirically, the show didn’t hit quite the same way it did when it first popped on my screen in August of 2020, before anybody was vaccinated, when we were still standing six feet apart in grocery stores and missing our loved ones like hell. We needed it then in a way I’m not sure we do now.

But are the friendship duos of Keeley and Rebecca/Ted and Coach Beard still a pleasure to be around? Would we still watch an entire series called “What Is Rebecca Wearing Today, and Can It Become My Religion?” Are you still curious about whether Ted and his ex, Keeley and Roy, Rebecca and the Dutch pilot end up together? Are you in the mood to promise you won’t cry, but then get verklempt when a prospective player shows up with her kid because she couldn’t get child care, and Coach Beard quietly tells her that his bartender mom brought him to work all the time, good luck at tryouts?

You know the answer. We all know the answer.

I think we should choose kindness. Whenever, wherever, however possible. Treating others well isn’t saccharine, it is sublime. Here in 2026 we might be battered and brittle from pandemics, elections and foreign wars, but if you can accept the fact that optimism can be a superpower, and that it’s okay to sometimes feel at peace, then “Ted Lasso” can be sublime.

So, choose to be the person and the America that makes you feel good about being that person and that America. Watch “Ted Lasso” for that reason alone: to remind yourself that there are things to love about this place where we all live. The “BELIEVE” sign is still there, even if it’s been re-torn and re-taped a hundred different times.

This earnest, ridiculous, vast, beautiful, hash-browns-from-Waffle-House, avocado-toast-from-California, 36-frozen-beef-patties-from-Costco place we all live.

Ranch goes well on every single one.