Glen Powell Is Charming. His Hulu Comedy Chad Powers Couldn’t Be More Obnoxious

Glen Powell’s rapid ascent from working actor to movie star constitutes one of Hollywood’s great charm offensives. Since positioning himself as his mentor Tom Cruise’s heir apparent in 2022’s cinema-saving Top Gun: Maverick, the 37-year-old Texan has endeared himself to Gen Z rom-com fans in the sleeper hit Anyone But You and revived another dormant action franchise with Twisters. The best showcase to date for his versatility is Hit Man, the 2024 Richard Linklater crime comedy in which he plays a timid professor who is recruited by law enforcement to impersonate an assassin for hire. Not only is Powell equally compelling as the academic and as the increasingly slick and confident killer personas that character created; he also helped write and produce the film, which boded well for his future as an A-list multihyphenate. Chad Powers, a Hulu comedy that he co-created with Michael Waldron (Loki, Heels), is another story about a guy pretending to be someone he’s not. Based on a viral stunt from Eli Manning’s ESPN show Eli’s Places (note the intra-Disney synergy) and featuring Eli and Peyton Manning among its executive producers, the six-episode series casts Powell as Russ Holliday, a former quarterback desperate to make a comeback eight years after humiliating himself at the Rose Bowl. He sees the perfect opportunity when a college football team announces emergency open tryouts. Because he’s too thoroughly canceled to show his real face on the field, Russ, whose father happens to do special effects makeup for a living, disguises himself with prosthetics, and Chad Powers is born. Powell might have been appealing enough to make this goofy premise work if Russ and his alter ego weren’t two of the most obnoxious TV characters in recent memory—and if the show didn’t seem cobbled together from older, better sports comedies. To be fair to Powell and Waldron, they clearly mean for Russ to give viewers the ick. Within the first few minutes of the premiere, we see him flip out after dropping a ball just short of the end zone, shove a father into his cancer-patient son’s wheelchair, drive a Cybertruck, babble about cryptocurrency, mention having competed in The Masked Singer, and hang out with Haliey “Hawk Tuah Girl” Welch—who quickly realizes she doesn’t want to be associated with him. He’s about to start playing for the XFL when the boy whose wheelchair he knocked over dies, setting off a new wave of anti-Russ sentiment and spooking even that not-especially-squeamish organization into dropping him. “It’s time for you to move on!” his dad (Toby Huss) bellows. Instead of giving up on football, he gives up on being Russ Holliday. Over his California-boy tan and frosted tips, he layers on a fleshy nose, rabbit-like cheeks, and a ratty, chin-length wig. He adopts an unpleasantly high-pitched Southern drawl. And with some last-minute styling help from the team’s mascot, Danny (Frankie A. Rodriguez), he walks into South Georgia Catfish tryouts as the ultimate catfish: Chad Powers. Russ is terrible at this charade; his sweet, awkward, dim-bulb Chad is a poor actor’s impression of a ’90s Adam Sandler doof. (Just because Powell’s performance of Russ’ performance of Chad is solid, doesn’t make the annoying character-within-a-character entertaining.) Everything from his faux signature to the fact that Chad neither attends the university nor possesses the identifying documents to enroll creates a new crisis. But he’s still a powerhouse on the field, which is enough to quiet the coaches’ reservations about his weird personality and smooth his way to becoming the team’s savior. While Chad is giving bush-league Sandler, the supporting characters are ripped from the playbook of Ted Lasso—another sports comedy based on a viral bit, not to mention a massively popular show whose title surely figured in the development of Chad Powers. The more subtle Ted to Russ’ broader Jamie Tartt is Jake Hudson (Steve Zahn, delivering a better performance than the material deserves), a good but beleaguered head coach who dispenses avuncular advice. His daughter Ricky (Perry Mattfeld), once a track star but now a “nepo baby” junior member of the coaching staff, is our Keeley, a chronically underestimated young woman who inevitably becomes Russ-as-Chad’s love interest. Danny’s gentleness and outsider status recall a pre-heel-turn Nate. There’s even an answer to A.F.C. Richmond owner Rebecca in Tricia (Wynn Everett), the rich, powerful, Hunting Wives type who heads up the Catfish’s boosters and, in a running gag that epitomizes the show’s sense of humor, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of porn franchises. There’s no spark of distinctiveness in any of these characters. I don’t love Ted Lasso, but I can understand what its millions of fans see in it. The series radiates warmth, celebrates flawed but generally well-meaning people—particularly men—coming together to learn how to show themselves and those around them the love everyone deserves. Chad Powers’ nasty protagonist should give it license to be more cutting, rather than just unimaginatively crude, in its humor. Instead, it, too, tries to go the inspirational pop-psychology route. Like so many shows targeted to male audiences, it turns to saccharine on the subject of father-child relationships. Jake and Ricky and Danny all seem to exist for the sole purpose of catalyzing narcissistic Russ’ discovery that the nice guy he’s pretending to be is a real facet of his personality. “I’m Russ, but I’m also Chad,” he realizes in what is supposed to be a breakthrough scene. If only the latter were actually an improvement on the former.