Ted Lasso season 4 ends on Apple TV, and Apple Books gives away a chapter of Trent Crimm's The Richmond WayTed Lasso season 4 ends on Apple TV, and Apple Books gives away a chapter of Trent Crimm's The Richmond Way

The fourth season of Ted Lasso ended on Apple TV on 7 October, and Apple Books released a free excerpt from The Richmond Way, a book written in the show by the journalist character Trent Crimm, the same day.

The season began on 5 August and ran for ten weekly episodes, Epicstream reports. It brought Ted back to coach a women's team, the Lady Greyhounds, after many fans had taken the third season as the end of the show.

What is in The Richmond Way excerpt?

Two free versions are on Apple Books: an ebook excerpt and an audiobook excerpt read in character as Crimm, 9to5Mac reports. The audio runs about 15 minutes. Apple's description presents it as a passage from the second edition of Crimm's bestseller about Richmond's remarkable season, with a letter from the author added for its second printing. AppleInsider describes it as tongue-in-cheek and written entirely inside the show's world.

Apple's description calls Crimm a former investigative reporter for The Independent, so the excerpt is fiction about fiction: a real book from a made-up author about a made-up team.

Is there a Ted Lasso season 5?

Apple has not announced one. Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Services, told ScreenRant in August that he hoped so, adding, as Epicstream quotes him, "It's certainly good enough for that." Epicstream reports that Jason Sudeikis has talked of carrying the Lady Greyhounds story through seasons four to six. 9to5Mac says reporting suggests Apple is already well on the way to a fifth season. None of that is an order for one, and the gap between the third and fourth seasons was three years.

Our take

Giving away a chapter of a fictional book is a small marketing idea, and a clever one, because it uses something Apple owns that Netflix does not: a bookshop and an audiobook store on every iPhone. Apple rarely uses its services together like this. A show on Apple TV pointing to a free read on Apple Books is the kind of link between its apps that would make the bundle feel like more than a bill.

Ted Lasso is also still the show that defines Apple TV for many people, which makes a fifth season more important to Apple than to most networks. When The Verge reviewed Small Prophets, which reached Apple TV this week to strong reviews, it measured the new comedy against the comfort of Ted Lasso, which shows how much the service's identity still rests on it.

APPDOOK's reading is that Cue's words were as close to a renewal as an executive gets without announcing one, and that a free excerpt timed to the finale is how you keep an audience warm through a long wait. For fans, the chapter is a quarter of an hour well spent while Apple decides.