Is There Beef Between Jason Sudeikis and Bill Lawrence?

Let’s get the fun answer out of the way first, OK: Yes, someone said on the record that Jason Sudeikis drove Bill Lawrence “insane.” Not an anonymous source. Not a “person familiar with the production.” An actual named human being with an actual job on the show.

That human being is Jack Burditt, the 30 Rock and Modern Family vet who signed on to co-run Ted Lasso’s fourth season, and the quote arrives in today’s Hollywood Reporter cover story: “I know he’s got this reputation, and I know he drove Bill insane, but I honestly feel like Jason’s easy.”

That’s the headline. Alas, here’s the actual story, which is more nuanced and not all that juicy.

Season three of Ted Lasso was, per THR (and every other outlet that’s reported on it), a slog (most audiences agree that the final product was, too!) Production started late and dragged months past schedule. Brendan Hunt — Coach Beard, co-creator, Sudeikis’s friend since their improv days — described it as “death by a thousand paper cuts,” a mix of COVID delays and several more waits for Sudeikis to catch up on scripts. After shooting all day, Sudeikis would work into the night doing final passes on the next day’s pages, which meant actors were learning lines as they came in. This jibes with earlier reporting from Puck, which described character arcs shifting mid-season and script changes on the fly.

Moreover, a show that ran roughly thirty minutes in season one was suddenly averaging close to an hour, with a seventy-five-minute finale, which did not exactly endear it with critics. Several sources put the season significantly over budget, which Sudeikis sort of denies - “We were budgeted as a 30-minute show when it became much more” — but sort of doesn’t: “Some people can look at a whiteboard of story ideas and know, ‘That is 22 minutes, that is 37 minutes.’ I haven’t done enough [serialized TV] to do that.”

Sudeikis gets it (also, per the THR article, Lawrence and Sudeikis first got together when Lawrence was considering him for the lead role in Bad Monkey, which could have worked, too. The role went to Vince Vaughn, his best in 15 years).

THR reports that several people associated with the show say tension had been mounting between Sudeikis and Lawrence. However, Sudeikis nips a full-blown beef in the bud: “Bill never yelled at me and I never yelled at him,” while also acknowledging that his “preference would have been to land the plane with the same people we took off with.”

In other words, he wishes Lawrence had stuck around.

And Lawrence’s own explanation, given to THR back in 2023, is disarmingly self-aware: “It was healthy for me to let go the third year because Jason is Ted Lasso and, especially landing the plane, deserves it to be his vision — and I’ve reached a point in my career where I’m not the best at having to listen to other people over my own opinion.” So, a 57 year old with a huge series of successes preferred to rely on his own instincts. That’s fair. Rather than turn Ted Lasso into a slow-motion bloodbath, he left.

There’s a reason why there is no beef: Bill Lawrence is currently running Shrinking, Bad Monkey, and Rooster (not to mention producing the Scrubs revival). He has plenty on his plate. He told ScreenRant he’ll be watching season four “as a fan.” He told the LA Times he’s not the leading creative voice on the show and Sudeikis is the one to ask. He told Collider, on whether the show should continue at all: “Not only is he the star, he’s the head writer, and he’s also the dude whose life just has to be completely overhauled and moved to a foreign country with young children.”

It’s Jason Sudeikis’s show. Lawrence gets that. He doesn’t have any hard feelings, in no small part because he has four other shows.

That said, Jack Burditt was warned about working with Sudeikis, apparently. Lawrence called him during the first week of season four production, gave him a twenty-minute download on how to handle the show and how to handle Jason, and proposed they check in every week or two. “I have not talked to him since.”

Make of that what you will. I don’t think it’s a cold shoulder so much as Lawrence just wanted to give Burditt a head’s up and move on.

In other words: No, there is no beef, just two guys with fundamentally incompatible working philosophies and one of them had the ego-free good sense to hand back the character that was never his to begin with.

And for the record, apparently those who have seen season 4 say it’s much better than season three and conjures up some of that old season-one magic. I hope so. It returns on August 5th and after a month of World Cup games, I could use the fix.

via THR