‘Ted Lasso’ Season 3 Premiere Sets Viewership Record

It had been more than a year since a new episode of Ted Lasso aired on AppleTV+, but it seems that absence truly made the heart grow fonder for viewers.

The season 3 premiere of the popular comedy set a new series high for its debut and also drew more viewers for an episode of a show on the platform in more than a year, according to numbers provided by Samba TV, which measures TV engagement.

Some 870,000 U.S. households viewed Ted Lasso’s premiere episode during the live-plus-four-day window, which measures viewership on the debut date and the four days afterward.

That was up 60% from season two’s season premiere, which drew 546,000 viewers in summer 2021. And it was way up from the series premiere, which came during the first year of the pandemic.

Samba notes that Lasso’s premiere overindexed among millennial households, including adults 25-34, compared to the national average.

“Audiences clearly ‘believe’ in the magic of the feel-good Ted Lasso series, with the third season opener scoring the most-watched premiere for any Apple TV+ original series in the past year,” notes Dallas Lawrence, Senior Vice President at Samba TV.

By comparison, Lasso’s influence certainly outweighs its audience. The program airs on one of the smaller streaming platforms (AppleTV+ hasn’t released subscription numbers, but analysts estimate it between 20 million and 40 million; top streamer Netflix has almost 231 million), yet it has dominated Emmy and Golden Globe awards and nominations the past couple years.

Its audience is barely half that of, say, Netflix’s mid-level hit That ‘90s Show, but it’s generated tons of buzz, sparking more than 100,000 searches during the week of its premiere, according to Google.

Of course, for a company trying to build a competitor to the much bigger Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Paramount+, the value of having a popular show is in drawing people to your platform and hoping they’ll sample other programs, too.

“Even better news for Apple is that AFC Richmond fans in the U.S. not only helped drive the streamer’s biggest premiere of the year, but also blew past season two’s numbers by more than 50%,” Lawrence says. “While notching these two wins is certainly a good sign, the real opportunity for Apple is to leverage the show’s fans into streamers of other content before they cycle out of their subscriptions.”

So far, this hasn’t necessarily been the case. Lawrence notes that “many leave [the platform] immediately after watching the show. In the second half of 2022, Ted Lasso was the most-watched show on Apple TV+ by audiences that watched only one program on the platform.”

AppleTV+ has plenty of new fare coming or recently bowed to promote in the preroll that airs before a new episode of Lasso begins, including the new Jason Segel comedy Shrinking, new Jennifer Garner drama The Last Thing He Told Me and upcoming action movie Ghosted with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas.

“Large single-season viewership, plus big increases in year-over-year new viewers, and a deepening engagement across a wider selection of content on the platform, are the real hat trick Apple needs, or I suppose in this case ‘believes,’ Lasso can deliver,” says Lawrence.