Ted Lasso stars were certain that nobody would bother using Apple TV Plus just for their show

It must be nerve-racking to develop a new TV show for a streaming service that hasn’t launched yet. You never know if the thing you’re pouring your heart and soul into will debut on the next Netflix or the next Seeso, or CNN+, or Quibi (actually, you can probably tell if you’re working on the next Quibi, especially if investors keep throwing money at it and you can’t figure out why). As it turns out, two of the stars of Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso went into the show’s first season with similar concerns, which makes sense since they were working on a TV show for Apple—a company that, until recently, mostly made phones and computers.

Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein and Hannah Waddingham revealed that detail in a recent Entertainment Weekly profile, with Waddingham noting that the two of them actually had a conversation about how “no one will watch [Ted Lasso]” because “it’s on Apple TV.” They agreed that it was a nice experience and that they had a “lovely time” making the first season, but Goldstein adds that he didn’t know how to get Apple TV+ and his parents didn’t know how to get it either, so his thought was, “Even if it was amazing no one’s going to watch it.”

Well, the joke was on them, because the somewhat aggressively upbeat and optimistic show ended up premiering during one of the bleakest periods in recent memory, which—paired with Apple’s propensity to give out Apple TV+ trials like candy—led to the show becoming an enormous hit (and, possibly, the one thing that stopped Apple TV+ from turning into another dead platform like HBO Max—actually, HBO Max is still around, we just thought it was dead because it’s losing a concerning amount of blood).