There is a very particular strain of reflex – I have it myself, chronically, and I suspect a good number of you do too – that treats unabashed niceness on television with deep, immediate suspicion. Someone is kind for more than four consecutive minutes and we assume either a con is coming or the writers have simply run out of ideas. Cynicism, we’ve long told ourselves, is the more sophisticated position. Sincerity is for children and Americans.

Ted Lasso spent three seasons quietly demolishing that entire worldview, and today, mercifully, unexpectedly, it’s back to have another go.

What’s actually happening

Season four premieres today, Wednesday 5 August, exclusively on Apple TV, and – in a small act of scheduling mercy for those of us who like our television doled out slowly, like a good whisky rather than skulled from the bottle – it’s arriving one episode at a time, every Wednesday, through to 7 October. No bingeing the whole thing in a fugue state on a wet Saturday. You’ll have to sit with it, week to week, the old-fashioned way.

The premise itself has had a proper reshuffle. Ted’s back in Richmond, but he’s swapped the men’s dugout for the touchline of AFC Richmond’s second-division women’s team – his “biggest challenge yet,” according to the show’s own framing, and a genuine tonal shift rather than a retread. Jason Sudeikis returns, obviously, alongside Hannah Waddingham’s Rebecca, Brett Goldstein’s Roy Kent, Brendan Hunt’s Coach Beard, Juno Temple’s Keeley and Jeremy Swift’s Higgins, with a clutch of new faces – Tanya Reynolds among them, as a new assistant coach – filling out the dugout. Ted’s son Henry gets considerably more screen time this season too, which, given how much of the show’s emotional spine has always run through that relationship, feels less like a subplot and more like the actual point.

Here is the detail I find genuinely touching, buried in the press cycle: this season very nearly didn’t happen at all. Season three was, by every account from the people who made it, written and shot as the ending. Waddingham has said she and Goldstein stood behind the crew truck on the last day of season one, half-convinced the show didn’t even know what it was yet. Sudeikis himself reportedly compared being asked back for a fourth season to your partner asking for a third child while you’re still elbow-deep in the second. And yet here we are.

Why the people who made it think it actually works

I went looking through the recent run of cast and writer interviews, partly out of professional obligation and partly because I wanted to know if they’d cracked the code themselves, and the answers were more interesting than the usual press-junket platitudes.

Jeremy Swift, asked whether kindness alone was still enough as the show’s operating system, gave what might be the best line to come out of the entire press tour: paraphrasing musician David Byrne, he suggested kindness has quietly become the punk rock of our current moment – genuinely radical precisely because it looks so unthreatening. Juno Temple picked up the same thread, arguing that ambition paired with real kindness and good intention is one of the more important things a person can practise in life, on screen or off it.

Hannah Waddingham, meanwhile, has been characteristically direct about why she thinks the whole thing landed in the first place: the show, she’s said, functioned as something close to a collective embrace, a running reminder to be kind and to check in on each other, delivered at a moment the world was starving for exactly that. And Sudeikis, when asked years ago whether the character’s relentless good humour was a deliberate choice, was unambiguous: playing someone genuinely kind-hearted, immune to sarcasm and negativity, was the whole design from the outset, not an accident of casting.

Warner Bros Television’s own chairman, Channing Dungey, put it more simply still: audiences responded to the humanity of it, and to the show’s stubborn belief in the underdog, at a moment when believing in much of anything felt in short supply.

Why you should watch it, unapologetically

I don’t think Ted Lasso is a great show because it’s edgy, or because it says anything particularly new. It’s a great show because it commits, entirely and without irony, to the idea that decency is not the same thing as weakness, and that a person can be soft-hearted and still be the smartest one in the room. That is a genuinely unfashionable position for television to take, and this new season, by every account from the people who made it, has doubled down on it rather than softening the edges to chase relevance.

So watch it. Watch it especially if some cynical corner of you assumes you’ll find it slight, or twee, or beneath you. I made that exact assumption myself, years ago, and I was thoroughly, happily wrong. Believe.