The Chad Powers Show: The Release Date, Cast, and Why You're Supposed to Care

So, let me get this straight. You take a five-minute viral sketch—a genuinely funny, one-off gag where Eli Manning, a guy with the charisma of a friendly golden retriever, goes undercover at a Penn State tryout—and you decide the world needs a six-episode, half-hour prestige comedy series based on it?

Who asked for this?

I’m sitting here looking at the press release for Chad Powers, the new Hulu show that dropped its first two episodes on September 30th, and I’m just baffled. This is it. This is the peak of the content brain. Find one thing that got a million clicks, strap it to a focus-grouped algorithm, and stretch it on the rack until it’s thin enough to see through.

The show stars Glen Powell, Hollywood’s current golden boy, as Russ Holliday. He's a disgraced college quarterback who, eight years after a legendary screw-up in the Rose Bowl, decides the only way back to glory is to slap on a ton of prosthetics and try out for a fictional SEC team as a walk-on named, you guessed it, Chad Powers.

It’s Mrs. Doubtfire meets Friday Night Lights, filtered through the laziest parts of Eastbound & Down. And everyone, offcourse, is comparing it to Ted Lasso. The critics who like it say it "transcends its source material," which is a fancy way of saying it’s better than a YouTube clip. The ones who hate it—and there are plenty, judging by its 56% "rotten" score on Rotten Tomatoes—call the humor "coarse and mean-spirited" and the execution "slapdash."

They’re not wrong. I watched the first two episodes. It's a mess. It wants to be an edgy, R-rated comedy about a washed-up jerk, but it also wants that sweet, sweet Lasso underdog sincerity. You can’t have both. It’s like mixing beer and ice cream; you just end up with a curdled, unappetizing sludge. This ain't a heartwarming story. It’s a story about a guy who lies and cheats his way onto a football team because he can’t handle his own failure.

And Glen Powell... look, I get it. The guy is on a hot streak after Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone but You. He’s got the smile, the charm, the abs. But this Chad Powers show feels like a massive miscalculation. It's a vanity project co-created by him and Michael Waldron of Loki fame. They’re both huge college football fans, and they keep talking about "authenticity."

That’s the big corporate buzzword they’re selling. "Authenticity."

They say they were inspired by Armageddon, of all things, in how they wanted to take a "ridiculous premise" and treat it completely seriously. This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of a creative choice. Armageddon worked because the stakes were, you know, THE END OF THE WORLD. The stakes here are whether a 30-something dude can relive his glory days by wearing a rubber nose. It's not the same thing.

Their version of "authenticity" means spending a ton of money to license real ESPN graphics and the logos for teams like the Georgia Bulldogs. They filmed at Sanford Stadium. They got Kirk Herbstreit to do a cameo. They even roped in "Hawk Tuah Girl" for a quick appearance, which tells you everything you need to know about how desperate this thing is to feel "current."

It's all window dressing on an empty building.

What this really is, is a brand extension. Eli and Peyton Manning are executive producers through their Omaha Productions. They’re not storytellers; they’re savvy businessmen who turned their post-NFL careers into a media empire. The original eli chad powers sketch was lightning in a bottle. This series is just the mass-produced, plastic bottle you buy at the gift shop. The Mannings helped Glen Powell with his quarterback mechanics and got the league on board. They greased the wheels. They made the product palatable for the college football industrial complex.

The creators admit they created a fictional team, the South Georgia Catfish, so they could have "bad behavior" without getting a real university's PR department in a twist. Translation: they wanted the credibility of the SEC without any of the accountability. They wanted to have their cake and make crude jokes about it, too. And the plot device for the disguise? The main character gets the idea from a Mrs. Doubtfire billboard and steals the prosthetics from his Oscar-winning makeup artist father. I mean, come on. It feels like it was written by a committee of interns who just finished a screenwriting 101 class.

It's just more… content. Another tile on the Hulu homepage designed to keep you from canceling your subscription for one more month. It’s not a story that needed to be told. It’s an IP that needed to be exploited. It’s a series of moments you’ve seen before in better shows, stitched together with the thinnest of premises.

Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe there’s a massive audience of people who want to watch a six-part series based on a meme from a couple of years ago. Maybe the sight of glen powell football scenes is enough. Maybe nobody cares that the story is a hollow echo of a dozen other, better things.

But I doubt it. This thing feels destined to be forgotten by the time the last of its six episodes airs at the end of October. It's a Hail Mary pass with no one in the end zone. A trick play that fools absolutely no one. It’s just… there. And honestly...

*

Content By Committee

You can feel the boardroom notes on this thing. "Make it edgy like Eastbound & Down." "But also give it the heart of Ted Lasso." "Get the Mannings for football cred." "Throw in a viral TikTok star." The result is a show with no soul, no identity, and no reason to exist beyond filling a slot in a streaming library. It’s not a story; it’s a product assembled from the spare parts of other, more successful products. And it’s a damn shame.

Reference article source：

• How ‘Chad Powers’ Co-Creators Michael Waldron & Glen Powell Adapted Eli Manning’s Viral ESPN Sketch Into A Half-Hour Comedy “That Actually Felt Impossible To Pull Off”
• ‘Chad Powers’ Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Come Out?
• ‘Chad Powers’ creators wanted authenticity. So they enlisted ‘Hawk Tuah Girl’ and the Mannings