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In the first episode of season two of Chad Powers, there is but one concern: the main character’s nose has fallen off.
The TV outlet for the wacky side of movie hottie Glen Powell, Chad Powers presents itself to us having willingly taken on the burden of a ludicrous premise. Powell is Russ Holliday, a former hotshot college-football quarterback who, eight years ago, committed a career-cancelling faux pas during the televised game that was meant to make him a star. With his sporting dreams suddenly vaporised, he became an obnoxious playboy. But then, just as he felt his feet starting to scrape rock bottom, he heard that a university in Georgia was holding open tryouts for a new quarterback. Donning prosthetic whiskers, teeth, hair and an occasionally unreliable nose – a slightly more sophisticated version of a joke-shop disguise – Russ became “Chad Powers”, a southern oddball and the new star of the team, while constantly dealing with the threat of being found out and sent home.
The series has been compared to Eastbound & Down, on account of its love of cartoonish characters being crass in a sporting context, and to the show that surely influenced its commissioning, Ted Lasso. Both Powers and Lasso feature a main character who is winging it, and both play off a naughty sense of humour against a weakness for sweet, folksy wisdom. In its overall structure, though, Powers most recalls Suits, the legal drama where one of the lawyers was secretly an unqualified impostor, and where the narrative was destined to destroy itself: the only thing that could really happen was someone finding out, but the more people who found out, the less room the story had to breathe.
By the end of season one, the Chad/Russ deception was known to team mascot Danny (Frankie Rodriguez), who recognised Russ on day one but vowed to assist him, because it suited his thwarted theatrical flair; and assistant coach Erika, AKA “Ricky” (Perry Mattfeld), a potential love interest who went cold on adorable Chad when toxic, selfish Russ made a reappearance and had sex with Ricky’s stepmother in his Tesla Cybertruck. (Incidentally, the show’s prominent featuring of the Cybertruck might you make think it was paid product placement, but instead it is visual shorthand for Russ being an agonisingly embarrassing loser, and one of its best gags.)
What next? The task for Chad Powers is to not be the TV equivalent of a bad Adam Sandler/Will Ferrell movie, with a funny first act and then a long, boring plateau as the novelty of the premise wears off. Season two has a few solutions.
One is just Chad carrying on being Chad, who, because his creator is frantically making everything up as he goes along, has a disarmingly unique imagination: he tries to get out of attending an event by claiming his Venus flytrap needs attention, and asks philosophical questions like: “What if balloons were afraid of heights?” Another is the looming threat of displaced and now dangerously disgruntled wannabe quarterback Gerry (Colton Ryan). Suits fans will spot that Gerry is the Louis Litt of the piece, as he tries to bring Chad down with increasingly manic recklessness, despite being a softie at heart.
There is also an attempt to lean into the serious dramatic potential of the mask Russ wears. Are all of us not, Chad Powers asks, wearing a mask in the workplace, and in relationships? And since everything Chad says and does is really Russ, which is the fiction and which the real man? That question gets more complex when we glimpse the damaged soul behind the crass preening of Russ, and we see that Russ’s overconfidence was a fake trait to hide behind long before Chad came along.
Celebrities, meanwhile, have another layer of artifice that they place between themselves and the world. Picking up on this, the show has the college capitalise on Chadmania by selling Chad face masks. To hide his temporary lack of a nose, Chad himself ends up wearing a mask for a heart-to-heart with Ricky, which means Powell has to act with just his eyes through solid plastic. He manages it, though he’s at his best when Chad removes all his disguises and reverts to Russ: Powell’s face mixes matinee-idol looks with a boyish vulnerability that’s perfect for showing us that Russ is not awful at all, just lost.
None of that is allowed to weigh heavily on what is still a stupid sports comedy peopled by charming doofuses, but this slightly more serious Chad Powers has given itself a shot at surviving for longer than it really should. It’s an underdog that’s worth cheering for.
