The Ted Lasso machine might be lumbering back to life

A hypothetical fourth season of Ted Lasso has seemed, fromthe first moment people started shrugging toward its potential existence, like a pipe dream. There’s something almost poignant about Apple’s unwillingness to bid a final, definitive farewell to the series, despite it telegraphing, with what we’d call some pretty extreme measures, that its third-season finale was a pretty good stopping point. After all, nobody likes to watch a loved one—i.e., the massive amounts of subscription dollars and Emmys the well-loved sports comedy regularly brought in for the streamer—say goodbye, and so AppleTV+’s refusal to admit things were over almost bordered on sweet.

Now, though, it’s starting to seem like the streamer’s “Ain’t over until it’s over, even though Jason Sudeikis kind of said it’s over” attitude is starting to move into “actually spending money” territory, with Deadline revealing today that Apple has officially opted to exercise its contract options on series stars Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, and Jeremy Swift. (I.e., the three members of the show’s main cast apparently covered under British actors union Equity.) That’s ahead of reported plans to secure new SAG-AFTRA contracts with the rest of the show’s cast (including co-creators Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt), whose contracts had lapsed in the 15 months since the show’s third-season finale aired. Provided the series can get its people in order—and most of the cast has expressed an interest in returning, if asked—it’d then be time to get a writer’s room back together to figure out where AFC Richmond heads next.

This is all pretty firmly in question mark territory, of course, with no bigger question mark than Sudeikis himself, who’s previously said that the show’s third season “is the end of this story that we wanted to tell,” and whose limited availability beyond that run has been one of the reasons for potentially ending there. Even if Ted himself doesn’t feature prominently in this hypothetical new season, Sudeikis has been a major, and frequently the dominant (after co-creator Bill Lawrence stepped back to focus more on other projects) creative voice behind the scenes on the series, so it remains to be seen what role he’ll take moving forward, if there is a moving forward.

So, yeah: Still extremely hypothetical, but money has changed hands at this point, which is as good a sign as any that there might be something here to Believe in.