Channing Dungey, Chairman and CEO of Warner Bros Television Group, has revealed that she has “had conversations” about bringing back the hit Jason Sudeikis sitcom Ted Lasso.
The much-loved comedy about an American college football coach who is hired to manage an English Premier League team ran for three seasons from 2020 to 2023 on Apple TV+.
Deadline reports that while speaking at the Banff World Media Festival on Monday, Dungey said that she’d discussed returning to the world of the show, either for a fourth season or with a spin-off focusing on one of the show’s characters.
“We’ve had conversations about all of the above,” said Dungey.
“I think Jason Sudeikis is open to the idea, but I think he wants to have the right idea, which I appreciate. We at Warner Bros appreciate, Apple appreciates, because it’s the sort of thing where you don’t want to go do more just for the sake of more, you want to go do more because you actually have something to say, you have a story that you want to tell. We’ll see what happens.”
At the same event, Dungey also said that she had considered which Warner Bros films could be adapted or rebooted for television.
“I think about things like Ocean’s Eleven, for example. That kind of a caper film, which is a great two-hour romp and what we might be able to do with that in sort of a limited series format, things like that might be kind of fun,” she said.
She continued: “But there are just so many titles that it’s really more about someone walking into the office with a perspective or a point of view, or this is why we should do this in this way. It’s not like there’s one title that I’m like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to dust it off’. It’s more when I look at certain films and think, ‘Okay, this was an amazing two and a half hours. But if we had a longer period of time to explore those categories, or to tackle that story, that’s really where the fun begins.’”
In a four-star review of the third season of Ted Lasso, The Independent’s Amanda Whiting wrote: “Despite no confirmation from Apple, there’s been ample speculation, fuelled by Sudeikis’s comments, that this is the award-winning series’ final outing, a possibility that’s laboriously foreshadowed by Ted’s ennui.
“‘Maybe my being here is doing more hurting than helping at this point,’ he says, a little nonsensically, considering he just led Richmond back to football’s top tier, but whatever. If this is the end, I hope to see Roy Kent spray non-alcoholic champagne into the air in victory, whether it makes any sense or not.”
