Ted Lasso Season 4: Every Episode Date, the New Cast, and How to Watch

If you have been waiting for news of a Ted Lasso return, the wait is over and has been for a month. Season four premiered on Apple TV on Wednesday 5 August 2026 and has been releasing one episode a week ever since. Five of the ten episodes are out. The finale lands on 7 October.

That makes this an unusual moment to write about the season: late enough that the shape of it is clear, early enough that half of it is still ahead. What follows is the full release calendar, the cast changes — which are bigger than a normal season-to-season shuffle — the price change Apple made partway through the run, and a straight answer to the question this site gets asked most about Apple shows: do you actually need a VPN to watch it from abroad?

The premise changed: Ted is now coaching a second-division women's team

The single most important thing to know before pressing play is that season four is not a continuation of the men's-team story that closed out season three. Apple's own announcement is unambiguous about the reset: "Ted returns to Richmond, taking on his biggest challenge yet: coaching a second division women's football team. Throughout the course of the season, Ted and the team learn to leap before they look, taking chances they never thought they would."

That one sentence explains almost every other change in the season. A new team means a new dressing room, which means a substantial intake of new characters and a corresponding reduction in screen time for the players who defined the first three seasons. It also gives the show a subject it has not had before — the resourcing and status gap between men's and women's football — which the new cast have talked about publicly as the reason the season exists at all.

Structurally, it means season four functions as a soft reboot inside a continuing show. The core front office is intact; the pitch is not. If you are returning after a gap and expecting to pick up exactly where season three left off, adjust expectations before episode one rather than during it.

Every remaining episode date, and the timing quirk that catches people out

Apple TV is running season four the way it runs most of its prestige drama: one episode a week, no binge drop, no double-episode weeks. Ten episodes, ten Wednesdays, starting 5 August and ending 7 October 2026. The calendar below marks what has already aired as of 4 September 2026.

There is one wrinkle worth knowing, and it is the source of most of the confusion online. The dates Apple lists are Wednesdays, but episodes actually unlock the evening before — 9pm ET, 6pm PT on the Tuesday. If you are in Europe or Asia that means the episode is typically available in the small hours of Wednesday morning your time, which is why some viewers report a show "arriving early" and others insist it did not.

One practical consequence of the weekly model: the season will still be releasing when the autumn television schedule fills up. If you are managing a watchlist, the finale week — the first week of October — is the one to protect.

Four regulars from the men's side are not back as regulars

The cast list is where the scale of the reset becomes obvious. The spine of the show returns: Jason Sudeikis as Ted, Hannah Waddingham as Rebecca, Juno Temple as Keeley, Brett Goldstein as Roy Kent, Brendan Hunt as Coach Beard and Jeremy Swift as Higgins. Andrea Anders, Annette Badland and Becky Ann Baker are back as Michelle, Mae and Dottie.

What has changed is the playing squad. Nick Mohammed, Phil Dunster, Toheeb Jimoh and Cristo Fernández — Nate, Jamie Tartt, Sam Obisanya and Dani Rojas — are not returning as series regulars. Given that the new team is a different team, that is a structural consequence rather than a falling-out, but it is a significant absence for anyone whose attachment to the show ran through those characters.

In their place is a new intake built around the women's squad, plus a recast: Grant Feely takes over the role of Henry Lasso, Ted's son.

That last column is doing real work. "Not returning as a series regular" is a contractual status, not a plot spoiler: it means an actor is not contracted for the season's run, which is entirely compatible with a guest appearance. Reporting that treats the two as the same thing is guessing. Behind the camera, the series was developed by Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, with Jack Burditt joining the executive producer roster for this season.

Apple raised the price of the service in the middle of the season

On 28 August 2026 — between episodes four and five — Apple raised the US price of Apple TV from $12.99 to $14.99 a month, and the annual plan from $99 to $119. The Apple One bundle went from $19.95 to $21.95. The new prices applied immediately to new subscribers; existing subscribers are notified roughly a month before the higher rate hits their billing.

This is the fourth increase in four years for a service that launched in 2019 at $4.99 a month. It is worth stating plainly because it changes the arithmetic on a common plan: subscribing for one month to watch a weekly show is a worse deal than it was in July, and a ten-week season no longer fits inside a single monthly cycle in any case — it spans three.

Practical rule:A ten-episode weekly season spans three monthly billing cycles, not one. If you are subscribing specifically for this show, either budget for three months or wait until the finale has aired on 7 October and watch the whole season inside a single cycle.

The annual plan changes that calculation again: at $119 it works out cheaper than eight monthly payments, so it only makes sense if you expect to keep the service well beyond this season. That is the same intro-versus-renewal question that runs through subscription pricing generally, and it is the one most people get wrong — our price index tracks exactly that pattern in the VPN market, where the gap between the advertised rate and the renewal rate is usually wider than the gap between competing providers.

You probably do not need a VPN for this show — and it is worth knowing why

Here is the honest version, which is not the version most streaming guides give you. Ted Lasso is an Apple Original, and Apple holds global rights to its own originals. That is precisely why originals tend to be available across every market where the service operates, while licensed films and third-party series — the stuff Apple rents from other studios — blink in and out by country. If you are a paying subscriber travelling abroad, the show itself is usually not the thing that breaks.

What does vary is everything around it. Apple determines what you can watch from two signals: your Apple ID account region and the country your device is connecting from. Those two disagreeing is a far more common cause of a missing title than any catalogue gap. So is the network you are on: hotel, campus, airport and corporate Wi-Fi routinely block or throttle streaming traffic, and a stream that fails on hotel Wi-Fi but works on mobile data is a network problem, not a licensing one.

So the useful framing is this. A VPN is not a key that unlocks a show you have no right to watch. It is a tool that makes your connection look like it is coming from your home country and encrypts it against the network you happen to be sitting on — which solves the two problems above, and solves nothing else. If your account region and your subscription are in order, that is often all that stands between you and episode six on a hotel connection.

• Account region beats everything. If your Apple ID is registered to a different country than your subscription expects, changing your apparent location will not fix it. Check the account first.
• Restrictive networks are the common real-world blocker. Hotel, airline, university and office networks are where streaming most often fails abroad, and encryption is the part of a VPN that actually helps there.
• Speed is the constraint people underestimate. A connection routed through another country adds distance; for a 4K stream that matters more than for browsing. If you use one, use a server near your home region rather than the fastest-looking one on the list.
• Check the terms. Using a VPN is legal in most countries, but streaming services' terms of service generally expect you to watch from where your account says you are. That is a terms question, not a legal one, and it is yours to weigh.

If you want the fuller picture of which services are strict and which are relaxed about connections from abroad, our guide to the best VPNs for streaming covers the differences platform by platform, and can I watch answers the availability question for a specific title and country. For Apple's own hardware, the Apple TV setup guide covers the router-level approach, because the Apple TV box does not run VPN apps directly.

What to actually do, depending on where you are

Stripping the above down to decisions:

1. 1At home, already subscribed: nothing to do. Episode six unlocks 8 September at 9pm ET / 6pm PT, listed as 9 September.
2. 2At home, not subscribed: decide between three monthly cycles at the new $14.99 rate or waiting until 7 October and watching the season in one. The second is cheaper; the first avoids ten weeks of spoilers.
3. 3Travelling, subscription active: try it first. Apple Originals travel well, and you may find nothing is wrong. If the app objects, check your account region before assuming a geo-block.
4. 4Travelling, on a restrictive network: this is the case where a VPN genuinely helps, mostly by encrypting past a network that is interfering with streaming traffic. Pick a server in your home country and closest to it.
5. 5Moving country long-term: the fix is your Apple ID region and payment method, not a connection trick. Anything else is a workaround stacked on an unresolved account problem.

And one thing worth saying because the season is only half out: nobody has announced whether this is the end. The finale on 7 October will close season four's story, but Apple has confirmed neither a fifth season nor a conclusion. Any headline that tells you otherwise this week is speculating.