Ted Lasso season 4 was Apple's biggest premiere ever

Specifically, Richmond fans watched 296.6 million minutes of “Home,” an amount that translates to roughly 564 years of the human race’s collective attention being pointed toward Hannah Waddingham’s ongoing struggles with sauce. That makes Ted Lasso season 4—which returned after multiple years away, and a third-season finale that walked right up to the line of screaming “This is a series finale!” without technically crossing it—the most successful debut in Apple TV’s history. (With or without the ol’ Plus attached.) And, sure, you could argue that a lot of that viewership was mere curiosity about how the hell the show’s creators (sans Bill Lawrence, who dipped) were going to bring the series back after closing out most of its existing narrative arcs—a factor that’s going to make it pretty interesting to see how the numbers for the season’s much-better second installment, which aired this week, will do—but, well, those clicks still spend, and the response certainly underlines that the mild critical reassessment of Lasso hasn’t hurt its cultural ubiquity.

The fourth season of Ted Lasso sees Jason Sudeikis’ title character (eventually) deign to be the coach of the new Richmond’s women’s team, reuniting him with Waddingham, Jeremy Swift, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt, and Juno Temple, while also introducing a new character to get eventually won over by Ted’s endless supplies of cookies and smiles, a new assistant coach played by Tanya Reynolds.