‘Chad Powers’ Review: Glen Powell’s Hulu Football Comedy Is a Disappointingly Conventional Farce With a Late-Game Hail Mary
It’s too early to count as a definitive trend, but at this stage in his career, Glen Powell has co-written two projects that share the thesis: “What if a very, very small quantity of latex was magically able to render somebody as inherently hunky as Glen Powell unrecognizable? What would he be able to do? What would he be able to become?”
All I’m saying is that Glen Powell must’ve been shown Tootsie at a very formative age.
In Hit Man, co-written with Richard Linklater, the Glen Powell character uses a very, very small quantity of latex (and some wigs) to … go undercover with the police to thwart murder-for-hire schemes, becoming a more confident man in the process. Think Shootsie. It’s only semi-plausible, but the charm of Powell and Adria Arjona makes the movie a delight.
In Chad Powers, a new Hulu comedy co-created with Michael Waldron (Loki), the Glen Powell character uses a very, very small quantity of latex (and a very bad wig) to … go back to college as a quarterback, becoming a better man in the process. Think Footsie. It’s only semi-plausible and, well, it’s hard to tell, exactly, about the show’s charm, even after watching the entire first season.
It turns out that I really need to see a second season of Chad Powers. Normally, when I say or think that, it’s because I love a show and can’t wait to see how things unfold.
In this case, it isn’t so simple. The sixth and final episode of Chad Powers takes the show — until that point conventional to a fault — to an intriguingly cynical place that made me wonder if all the things I found completely unconvincing had been intentionally unconvincing and if Chad Powers had been, in fact, a stealthily subversive series all along. If the finale is a starting point for the somewhat dark story Chad Powers actually wants to be, you can consider me truly curious. If the finale is just a contrived speed bump to over-extend what’s conventional about the show and its unpersuasive redemptive arc, I don’t like Chad Powers very much at all.
And if that isn’t helpful for you, dear reader, imagine how it makes me feel!
Powell plays Russ Holliday, a superstar for the University of Oregon. A dual-threat quarterback, Russ weathers a difficult senior year filled with on-field highlights and off-field legal drama, leading Oregon to the national championship against Georgia at the Rose Bowl. Just as Russ is about to reach the pinnacle of college athletic achievement, a pair of blunders torpedo the season, his public image and his future professional career.
Eight years later, Russ is still a wreck as a person — he’s a crypto-loving, Cybertruck-driving, conspiracy-spewing tool who refuses to take responsibility for any of his failings — but he’s on the verge of a second shot at football when an earlier scandal returns to the headlines and brings Russ back to zero.
Staring into the abyss, Russ sees a story about the South Georgia University Catfish football team, coached by Steve Zahn‘s Jake Hudson. After losing his top two quarterbacks in the transfer portal, Coach Hudson announces that he’s conducting open tryouts for the position.
Stealing a box of latex molds from his movie makeup artist father (Toby Huss, egregiously underused), Russ drives to Georgia (for the tax credits) figuring that he’ll try out for the football team incognito, prove to the world that he’s a professional-level quarterback and resurrect his dreams. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense. There are several steps he hasn’t considered.
Sporting unruly long hair, lip and chin and nose enhancements and buck teeth, Russ doesn’t look like a genuinely new person so much as he looks like like a handsome man in latex, which is enough to fool Coach Hudson, the team’s quarterbacks coach (Clayne Crawford, egregiously underused) and Coach Hudson’s daughter Ricky (Perry Mattfeld), a brilliant football mind constantly trying to prove herself. Only one person, the Catfish mascot (Frankie A. Rodriguez’s Danny), knows his secret, helping Russ with his subterfuge for reasons that are vague and best taken at latex-covered face value.
Russ becomes Chad Powers and, using an underdeveloped gift for improvisation, affects a thick accent, a reedy, childlike voice and a backstory that leads everybody to believe that he suffered from a brain injury as a child or possibly has a touch of the “seetie,” as lead booster Tricia (Wynn Everett) refers to “CTE.” Tee-hee. Brain injuries.
This leads to many, many, many jokes about Chad’s diminished mental capacity, including references to Radio, Slingblade and more. After a while, the show runs out of indirect ways of making fun of Chad for his simplicity — leading up to the third episode, in which several people just call him a “retard” a lot, with the joke basically being that people are saying “retard” a lot. It’s not really funny, but very little in the show is funny. Though I’ll admit that several of Chad’s absurd improvisations in the second episode made me laugh, even if those improvs don’t make a lick of sense coming from the mind of Russ Holliday or the mouth of Chad Powers.
It was only after watching the sixth episode that I considered the possibility that the show might be intended as dark satire under the generally bright, cheery exterior delivered by the writers and series directors led by Tony Yacenda.
What if the entire show is a takeoff on the contrivances of Tootsie-style “become a better man by becoming a woman” (or, in this case, an inbred man coated in latex) farce? Chad Powers is hollow and unconvincing — especially the hints of Russ’ self-improvement and the inevitable vague flirtations between Chad and Ricky — but what if it’s all supposed to be hollow and unconvincing? What if this show (featuring Eli and Peyton Manning among its executive producers and boasting almost nonstop product placements and corporate synergy with various Disney brands) is a sneering critique of those products and brands and the overall industry of college football, in which a budding superstar doesn’t so much as mention going to a single class? What if the show is actually tweaking tropes played for more straightforward comedy in everything from Just One of the Guys to Back to School?
And what if a major piece of this hypothetical renegade ethos is seeing how far Glen Powell’s abundant natural charm can be pushed in having him play two characters who are completely unlikable in different ways? Both Russ and Chad are inconsistently written, but Powell is fully committed to all of their inconsistencies. The thing he’s most consistent with is his general athleticism, letting Yacenda and the other directors deliver a couple of above-average football sequences.
Still, the show never gets beyond Russ being a showboating jackass and Chad being the low-IQ projection of a showboating jackass. I can accept that this unappealing incongruity is a feature and not a bug, but I can’t rule out that the show is simply surface-deep and wants you to think Russ is a rakish antihero, which he’s not.
Rodriguez ends up with more of the season’s funny moments than anybody else, though I’m once again not quite sure if Danny — provided with no character details other than a love for musicals and the willingness to help Russ apply makeup — is meant as a takeoff of stereotypical gay best friends or if he’s just the stereotypical gay best friend.
Given how broad so much of the show is, it’s pleasant to see Zahn and Mattfeld underplaying what is a sweet and occasionally nuanced father-daughter relationship. They’re good together, and you could come away feeling like a show about them might have been better, or at least easier to embrace without reservations.
And my reservations about Chad Powers are, as I hope you can tell, rather great. For five-plus episodes, despite occasional chuckles, I felt like the show wasn’t working at all. At the end of the sixth, I was open to the possibility that Chad Powers is trying to be an odd and self-referential show about how the genre itself no longer works. I’m really not sure.
