Exactly one moment in the third season premiere of “Ted Lasso” made me laugh, and it’s when kit man Will (Charlie Hiscock) tells Ted that Kenneth has been living at the Richmond stadium ever since his cult got shut down. “Kenneth was in a cult?!” Ted asks, alarmed. “No, no, he was the leader of one,” Will answers reassuringly. It’s the kind of absurd exchange that the show always does well, but the rest of the episode is filled with softball jokes with half-punchlines that don’t quite land. Some of the potentially funnier lines, like when Nathan (Nick Mohammed) accidentally quotes a song from “The King And I” or Ted says the “last one to the parking lot has to eat a little bug,” go by super quickly or fall oddly flat. Meanwhile, other jokes feel like the La Croix version of “Ted Lasso”: less comedy than the barely perceptible “essence” of comedy.
It doesn’t help that the time jump in the new season of “Ted Lasso” has left almost every character as the worst version of themselves. Nearly everyone seems to be at a low point, from Keeley (Juno Temple), who has to schedule in cry breaks in her new office after breaking up with Roy (Brett Goldstein), to Rebecca, who is suddenly once again full of petty insecurity that causes her to yell at Ted. Dark side Nathan, meanwhile, continues to be the type of villain who’s no fun to watch. He’s not fun-mean, he’s just mean-mean, telling players on the West Ham team to stand on “the dumb dumb line” and spitting under the table to get himself in a vicious state of mind during a press conference.
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