Review: Ted Lasso, "Mae Rides the Bus" | Season 4, Episode 9

It’s hard to un-ring a bell when it comes to spoilers.

Although the screener for this week’s Ted Lasso has been up since the middle of last week, circumstances meant I didn’t have time to watch it in advance. I was going to be on a plane today, though, and so I planned to watch the episode and write about it on my lengthy layover.

But because I was online in the 16-ish hours the episode was released before that flight, I was exposed to details about the episode. None of these spoilers were explicit, mind you, but even in trying to scroll past them the gist was clear: one character is likely dead, while another character’s storyline featured a twist.

When this happens, the work of a critic is inherently compromised. My position is that episodic reviews are best understood as a gut reaction, a critic working through their feelings about an episode immediately after watching it. And while it’s true that viewers won’t always come into the episode with identical points of reference, as they’re just as likely to have been exposed to spoilers as we are, I always want to at least remain in touch with the perspective of the viewer who wasn’t spoiled—this is especially true in the case of episodes that are designed to draw emotional reactions.