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The single show that comes closest to Ted Lasso is Shoresy. Not because it's about sports, though it is. Because it does the exact trick Ted Lasso pulled: it takes a character who was originally a joke — Shoresy started as a foul-mouthed off-screen chirp on Letterkenny — and quietly rebuilds him into a lead you actually root for, surrounded by an ensemble of misfits inside a dying institution (a semi-pro hockey team in Sudbury, Ontario) who slowly become a family. Same DNA: workplace + sports + earned sentimentality + a lead whose warmth sneaks up on you while you were busy laughing at the accent. Skip the rest of this article if you trust me. It's on Hulu. Go.
Still here? Fine. Here's the rest, ranked honestly.
A quick note on how I picked. Ted Lasso is doing several things at once. It's a fish-out-of-water comedy. It's a workplace ensemble. It's sports-adjacent. It's about kindness as a strategy, not a personality trait. And it's got that specific pacing where episodes drift into feelings you didn't sign up for. Any recommendation has to hit at least two of those. Most "similar shows" lists throw in every British sitcom ever made and call it a day. That's lazy. Coffee Prince is not like Ted Lasso. A Korean romance about a woman pretending to be a man to work at a cafe is a great show. It is not this show. Moving on.
Tier 1: Closest Match
Shoresy (2022, 3 seasons, Hulu)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: The exact same emotional trick. An ensemble of broken men inside a struggling sports franchise, running on locker-room chemistry and earned tenderness. Jared Keeso created Letterkenny, so the dialogue rhythm is heightened, quick, weirdly poetic. There are cries. In a hockey show. About a guy whose whole bit was your mom jokes.
Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. It's a six-episode first season. You will know by episode three.
Different from Ted Lasso: Way more profane. No Roy Kent equivalent because everybody is Roy Kent. The soccer optimism is swapped for Canadian rink-town fatalism, which is its own kind of hope.
Commitment: 3 seasons, ~25 min episodes. Ongoing. Renewed.
🏆 DROP EVERYTHING
Brassic (2019, 6 seasons, Hulu)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: A British ensemble of screw-ups who love each other and would die for each other and also can't stop making terrible decisions. Joe Gilgun as Vinnie is one of the great TV lead performances nobody in America talks about, doing the same thing Jason Sudeikis does — playing a wounded man whose humor is a shield you keep almost seeing through. Northern England setting delivers the same you-are-somewhere-specific feeling that Richmond gave Lasso.
Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. Don't skip around.
Different from Ted Lasso: It's not about kindness as a philosophy. It's about loyalty as a philosophy, which is its rougher cousin. Also there's a bipolar plotline that the show takes seriously, and it works.
Commitment: 6 seasons of about 6-8 episodes each. Ended in 2025 on its own terms, which almost never happens.
✅ WORTH IT
Running Point (2025, 1 season, Netflix)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: Mindy Kaling and Ike Barinholtz built this as an unofficial Lasso-shaped hole-filler for the streamer-comedy audience. Kate Hudson runs a fictional Lakers-adjacent basketball team she's underqualified for. Ensemble of oddballs. Workplace-plus-sports. Fish-out-of-water lead who wins people over. It's the most direct structural clone on this list.
Starter: Pilot. You'll know in twenty minutes if the Kaling-brand rhythm works for you.
Different from Ted Lasso: Less soul. The jokes land more than the feelings do. It's a very good hangout show that occasionally gestures at depth without committing.
Commitment: 10 episodes so far, ~30 min. Renewed for season 2.
✅ WORTH IT
Tier 2: Strong Match
Ballers (2015, 5 seasons, Max)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: Sports-world workplace comedy where the actual sport is secondary to the men circling it. Dwayne Johnson plays a retired football player turned financial manager, and the show is really about male friendship, ambition, and the specific loneliness of second acts. The Rock does his charm thing, which is a distant cousin of what Sudeikis does.
Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. The first two seasons are the good ones.
Different from Ted Lasso: Miami-flavored, money-obsessed, way more cynical about the industry. Nobody's baking biscuits. It's Entourage with cleats.
Commitment: 5 seasons, half-hours. Ended 2019.
🛋️ BACKGROUND TV
The Four Seasons (2025, 1 season, Netflix)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, and Kerri Kenney-Silver as three couples on a quarterly getaway that gets destabilized by a divorce. It's a comedy about adult friendship and emotional maintenance, which is the actual thing Ted Lasso was about underneath the soccer. Warm, funny, sneaks up on you.
Starter: Pilot. It's an eight-episode arc built as one story.
Different from Ted Lasso: No sports, no workplace, no fish-out-of-water. It's Big Chill energy. Older, married, midlife-flavored. The heart is there. The premise isn't.
Commitment: 8 episodes, ~30 min. Renewed for season 2.
✅ WORTH IT
Platonic (2023, 2 seasons, Apple TV+)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: Apple TV+ house style. Same shot language, same lighting, same we-can-afford-to-let-scenes-breathe pacing. Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen as former best friends reconnecting in midlife, and it's genuinely funny about male-female friendship in a way TV usually isn't. If you liked how Ted Lasso used adult conversation as a comic engine, this hits the same nerve.
Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. Ten episodes, easy watch.
Different from Ted Lasso: No sports, no team. It's a two-hander. Rogen is doing a Rogen, which is fine if you like Rogen and a lot if you don't.
Commitment: 2 seasons, ~30 min. Renewed for season 3.
✅ WORTH IT
Tier 3: Tangential But Worth It
Barney Miller (1975, 8 seasons, Prime Video)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: The ur-example of the warm workplace ensemble. A Manhattan police precinct where the boss is a decent, patient man managing a squad of oddballs who half-listen to him. The whole modern hangout-workplace-comedy grammar starts here. Ted Lasso is a great-great-grandchild of this show and would tell you so.
Starter: Season 2, Episode 1 ("Doomsday"). Season 1 is finding its feet; seasons 2-5 are the sweet spot.
Different from Ted Lasso: It's from 1975. No serialized emotional arcs. Every episode is a self-contained bottle. Watch it like radio.
Commitment: 170 episodes across 8 seasons. Long-ended. Immortal.
✅ WORTH IT
Boston Legal (2004, 5 seasons, Hulu)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: James Spader and William Shatner as the closest thing broadcast TV has ever produced to Ted and Beard — two men whose friendship is the actual show, wrapped inside a workplace ensemble that's technically about something else. Absurd, warm, occasionally very moving between the lawyer jokes.
Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. If Denny Crane doesn't land in the pilot, bail.
Different from Ted Lasso: It's a legal procedural, so there are cases, and some of them are dumb. Also David E. Kelley writes long speeches, which either works for you or it super doesn't.
Commitment: 5 seasons, hour-longs. Ended 2008.
✅ WORTH IT
Unstable (2023, 2 seasons, Netflix)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: Rob Lowe and his actual son John Owen Lowe as a father-son biotech duo, and the show trades on the same fundamental engine as Ted Lasso: warmth between men who don't know how to say the thing. Small workplace ensemble. Half-hours. Feels like the last of a dying breed.
Starter: Season 1, Episode 1. Eight episodes.
Different from Ted Lasso: Much smaller in scope, much lower stakes, and honestly a couple of the supporting characters are undercooked. It's a hangout show, not an event.
Commitment: 2 seasons, ~30 min. Cancelled after season 2, which ended cleanly enough that you don't feel robbed.
🛋️ BACKGROUND TV
Peep Show (2003, 9 seasons, Prime Video/Channel 4)
What it shares with Ted Lasso: British, funny, character-driven, and if you've been in the UK-comedy well long enough, the tonal DNA is there. Mark and Jeremy are the anti-Ted — cowardly where he's brave, cynical where he's sincere. It's the flip side of the same coin.
Starter: Season 2, Episode 1 ("Dance Class"). The first season is a bit rough; the show becomes iconic starting in season 2.
Different from Ted Lasso: Basically the opposite emotionally. Zero optimism, zero sentimentality, brutal POV camera work. If you loved Ted Lasso because it made you feel good about people, this will make you feel bad about them. In a funny way.
Commitment: 9 seasons, ~25 min. Ended 2015.
✅ WORTH IT
Skip These
TMDb's algorithm also recommended The League, Coffee Prince, North and South, and Nagi-Asu: A Lull in the Sea as similar to Ted Lasso. They are not. The League is a raunchy fantasy football sitcom with none of the warmth. The other three are a Korean romance, a Civil War miniseries, and a Japanese anime about undersea civilizations. Great in their own lanes. Not this lane. This is what happens when "similar" is calculated by tag overlap instead of soul.
🐍 SLOP (verdict is on the algorithm, not the shows)
FAQ
What's the single show most like Ted Lasso?
Shoresy. It's the only one on this list that reproduces the specific alchemy — a lead you underestimate, an ensemble that becomes a family, a sports institution used as a container for feelings — without diluting it. It's shorter, cruder, and Canadian, which is somehow all it needs to be its own thing.
Is there anything as good as Ted Lasso?
Honestly, in the same lane, no. Season 1 of Ted Lasso is a lightning strike, and lightning doesn't strike twice on demand. Shoresy is the closest at the level of craft. Brassic is the closest at the level of heart. Neither will replace it. Both will get you through the withdrawal.
Did the Ted Lasso creators make anything else?
Bill Lawrence created Scrubs, Cougar Town, and the current Apple TV+ show Shrinking, which shares a chunk of the Lasso writers' room and Brett Goldstein co-created it. Shrinking is the most literal answer to "what's next from these people" and it's very good, though it isn't on this list because it isn't officially in the TMDb similarity data — worth knowing about anyway.
Where can I watch Ted Lasso?
Apple TV+. All three seasons. A fourth season is officially in production for 2026, with Jason Sudeikis returning as Ted, so if you've been putting it off waiting for it to end, you can stop waiting and start watching.
Start Here This Weekend
Start Shoresy season 1, episode 1 on Hulu. It's twenty-two minutes. If you're not in by the end of it, you've saved yourself six seasons of homework. If you are in — and you will be — you have a full weekend of hockey, feelings, and mom jokes ahead of you, and a small Canadian rink town waiting to become your new Richmond.