'Ted Lasso' Season 4 reveals premiere date, first footage

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The highly anticipated fourth season of "Ted Lasso" has finally set its premiere date: The show will be back on Wednesday, Aug. 5, with new episodes airing weekly through Oct. 7.

Apple TV has also dropped a first teaser for the new season. The montage-heavy trailer, released on April 28, is light on dialogue or plot but features a look at the returning cast and new characters, as Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) returns to Richmond to coach a women's soccer team.

Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Brendan Hunt and Jeremy Swift are all back for the new episodes, while new additions for Season 4 include Tanya Reynolds, Jude Mack, Faye Marsay, Rex Hayes, Aisling Sharkey, Abbie Hern and Grant Feely.

In Season 4, "Ted returns to Richmond, taking on his biggest challenge yet: coaching a second division women's football team," Apple's plot synopsis says. "Throughout the course of the season, Ted and the team learn to leap before they look, taking chances they never thought they would."

The return of "Ted Lasso" will come more than three years after Season 3 of the Emmy-winning comedy, which at the time was thought to be the end of the series.

In numerous interviews, the series' creators had said they had a three-season story arc planned for the show from the beginning, and in 2023, the last episode of Season 3 appeared to close the book. The series follows an American, Ted Lasso, who heads overseas to coach a British soccer team, and at the end of the third season, he said goodbye to his colleagues and returned home to be with his son.

But Apple never formally announced Season 3 as the final season of "Ted Lasso," and the finale seemed to set up some sort of continuation about a women's team. There was speculation that this could lead to a spinoff series without Sudeikis. By 2025, though, it was revealed that the show would be getting a full-on fourth season, with Sudeikis back as Ted.

Some actors from the first three seasons, though, have not been announced as part of the Season 4 cast, including Nick Mohammed, who played Nate, and Phil Dunster, who played Jamie Tartt.

"Ted Lasso" debuted its first season in August 2020, providing a dose of optimism and comfort amid the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The show also gave Apple TV one of its first big hits, less than a year after the streaming service launched. The first two seasons of "Ted Lasso" both won the Emmy for outstanding comedy series.

Contributing: Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY