Declan Lowney directed the last two episodes of “Ted Lasso‘s” third and final (for now) season, but that wasn’t the original plan. Lowney, who won an Emmy in 2022 as a producer on the show, was slated to helm the opening block of Season 3 until various delays and scheduling conflicts with another project caused him to drop out for what he thought was for good.
“It was a bit of a happy accident,” Lowney tells Gold Derby during our Directors Guild of America Awards TV nominees panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “Just before they were due to start prep on the first two episodes, the whole shoot got pushed a month. They weren’t quite ready. I had a clash with another job I already had, ‘The Big Door Prize,’ the other Apple show. So I had to pull out. I was contracted to the other show. So then they asked me, ‘How about doing the last two?’ And because the show had a few hurdles and there were a few delays with COVID and stuff like that, the dates kept pushing and pushing and pushing, so I was hanging around waiting for it to happen, but it eventually did. It was just meant to be that way.”
During this waiting period, Lowney received outlines for the final two episodes, so he had a general idea of how this version of “Ted Lasso,” which creator and star Jason Sudeikis had always planned as a three-season story, would wrap up. “We had a clue what was happening and we knew the end had to be a big montage,” Lowney notes. “I think that pressure was really on the script. They had to hit a lot of beats and the beats had to pay off in a way that left viewers feeling happy they wrapped up. So our pressure was more just trying to make it all work because it was such a huge machine with so many moving parts. The pressure on us was more about containing it and making it happen in a way that was going to work.”
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Lowney, who has directed eight “Ted Lasso” episodes total, received Emmy and DGA nominations for helming the finale, “So Long, Farewell,” which takes its title from the “Sound of Music” song. The AFC Richmond team performs the tune for Ted (Sudeikis), who’s about to return to Kansas, but it also doubles as a goodbye to the show’s fans for the time being. “We mimicked the choreography from the original and worked very tightly with the choreographer so you didn’t quite know what was happening. The camera was going wider and wider, and suddenly they’re all there,” Lowney explains. “At the end of the song, we didn’t expect everyone to go nuts like that. I had a drone for the last bit for the pull-away, but when Ted just said, ‘That was perfect,’ the team just went nuts. They started pulling off clothes and shirts and jumping around the place and hugging. And it was fantastic. We had three cameras rolling on this stuff and everything felt very real, so we didn’t use our big drone pull-away because we had everyone hugging and that stuff was much more fun.”
A montage at the end of the episode set to Cat Stevens‘ “Father and Son” reveals the futures of the characters — and is not, as some fans have theorized, a dream. The montage was “quite a bit longer” before Sudeikis shortened some moments, but no full scenes were removed. “It’s still a very long montage. Each moment was so different from the last. We tried doing left to right with invisible wipes between them, so a lot of it was that,” Lowney says. “But certain beats just didn’t lend themselves to it and you tried to force stuff in. It’s slightly organic.”
With the fate of “Ted Lasso” up in the air, everyone was, expectedly, emotional during production on the finale. “In the last week or so, as we would wrap with an actor, that was it. They’re gone forever. The day Juno Temple left the set — oh, gosh. I mean, it took so long to get her out the door. Everybody was in bits,” Lowney shares. “It was a very close-knit, very tight sense of family. As the actors left one by one, then there was only six of us, then there was only four of us, and then it was down to us here in L.A. It was very moving. It was a very special thing to be a part of.”
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