We’ll admit to a certain perverse, sustained fascination with Hulu’s upcoming sports comedy Chad Powers, a bizarre Mrs. Doubtfire riff, based off of an Eli Manning viral streaming clip, that we once described as one of the worst ideas for a TV show we’d ever heard. The premise is as simple as it is goofy: Hire 36-year-old Glen Powell to play a disgraced former college football star who puts on bizarre prosthetics in order to masquerade as a college student walking on to a team, and then—obviously—learns to be a good human being through sustained, Matthew McConaughey-flavored lying. Don’t get it twisted, though: If you suggest that this streaming ensemble sports comedy about a fish-out-of-water Southern stereotype learning and teaching lessons in good sportsmanship bears any resemblance to any other Emmy-winning TV shows you might care to imagine, everyone involved will get very cranky with you, very quickly.
This is our major takeaway from a profile THR ran on the whole Chad Powers team this week, most of which is devoted to noting how charming and successful Glen Powell is. (There is much banter with producers Eli and Peyton Manning about whether Powell holds the football right. He doesn’t!) The only part where the layer of “We’re just some bros having fun here” civility falls away is when writer Tony Maglio brings up the Ted Lasso in the room. Maglio notes that neither Powell, nor the Mannings, “love discussing the parallels” between the two series, which feels like a moment we would have loved to see actually go down. It falls to Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich to lay out the icy rejoinder, calling any of the very obvious comparisons “A narrow view and quite a disservice to both shows.”
All of which translates, in our minds, to “Boy, we’re gonna get asked about this a lot, huh,” which is going to be interesting to watch play out as Chad Powers heads toward its September 30 premiere. (Not helped by the continued rumblings of Ted Lasso itself slowly dragging itself back to life.) By then, at least, we’ll have lots of looks at Powell’s genuinely unsettling prosthetics to distract us from the comparisons, as we struggle to compare the result to any real person, let alone Jason Sudeikis. Still, never let it be said that Powell himself isn’t a hell of an actor: If he can sell, in the middle of the THR profile, that he thinks Eli Manning was actually a good improviser in that original Chad Powers ESPN+ clip, maybe he can sell this other clear prevarication, too.
