Everyone Watches Women’s Sports, Including ‘Ted L***o’ Fans

“We all felt extremely competent and, dare I say, blocky,” she said. Then the production brought in the extended team, some of them professional players.

“We were humbled pretty quickly,” Hern said, but the professionals were supportive. “Anything that needed tweaking, any skill that we wanted to learn, they would be like, let’s go,” she said.

There is some tension, at least initially, in how to insert the Lady Greyhounds into the show’s playbook. They don’t appear in the first episode — instead the camera still delights in Ted and his mustache — and it is unclear whether any of them will become as central to the series as players like Roy (Brett Goldstein) and Jamie (Phil Dunster) did in earlier seasons. Later episodes show how fans and the media resist a women’s team, which seems to mirror what the creators and crew fear of some “Ted L***o” fans.

“We have a load of stigma from a lot of people who will judge women’s football,” Parslow said.

But he and Burditt insisted the soccer sequences would be just as exciting, even if the tempo of the women’s play was arguably slower. “The men are faster,” Burditt said. “With the women, maybe it’s more strategic. At least you can see it better.”

As for the non-sports scenes, this new “Ted L***o” is, for better and worse, the “Ted L***o” of old, with a few more ponytails. The folksy humor is the same, as is the belief in human goodness and potential.

“If you watched the show and now you think it’s gone ‘woke,’ well, I don’t know how much attention you were paying before,” Hunt said. “We’ve always had a fairly empathetic bent.”