Since Glen Powell’s Chad Powers was first announced, there’s been a kind of creeped-out fascination with it at The A.V. Club. In the show, the actor portrays a disgraced college quarterback who pulls a Juwanna Mann, reinventing himself as the titular player. Staff writer William Hughes dubbed it “one of the worst ideas” he’d ever heard and described Powell’s Chad voice as “What if Porky Pig got bit by a rabid Matthew McConaughey?” Poking fun at this project from pretty much every angle (the voice, the look, the premise, the source material) sure has been a lot of fun. But to sit with all six episodes isn’t, as they amount to about three hours of the same goddamn joke: Chad sounds a bit off, looks a bit off, says weird things, and may get discovered as a fraud at any second. Oh, and there’s some mean-spirited jock humor.
Things begin with Russ Holliday (Powell, who created the series with Michael Waldron) blowing it at the Rose Bowl by literally dropping the ball just before the end zone, leading to a nimble turnover by the Georgia Bulldogs and Holliday’s subsequent crash-out that gets him banned from the sport. A young fan with cancer attempts to console him following the loss, but Holliday responds dickishly to the boy, gets called out by the kid’s dad, and then attacks him and knocks over the child’s wheelchair—all on national television. Fortunately for Holliday, he rebounds a touch by appearing on The Masked Singer and taking on depressing Cameo gigs. He even has an offer to play in the XFL—that is, until it all goes away when the young fan dies and clips resurface of the Rose Bowl blunder.
For the next eight years, Holliday crashes on his dad’s couch. But the thing about his father (played by an impressively crabby Toby Huss) is that he’s an Academy Award-winning prosthetics and makeup artist. Do you see where this is going? While delivering some rubbery face parts and a wig to the lot where they’re filming Michael Bay’s Davy Crockett movie and scrolling socials while driving, Holliday sees that Jake Hudson (the ever-solid Steve Zahn) is resorting to open tryouts to find a QB for his team, the very on-the-nose South Georgia Catfish. He drives the college from Hollywood, stolen silicone in tow, and abruptly bonks into a new pal-to-be, Catfish mascot Danny Cruz (Freddie A. Rodriguez). Cruz initially thinks he’s a school shooter, then quickly clocks him as Holliday—from tabloids, not football—taking it upon himself to be his co-conspirator, makeup artist, and housemate.
The comedy is based on Eli Manning’s stunt for his ESPN+ show. And in Manning’s version, the stakes are not high; he merely dons the prosthetics in order to gain firsthand experience of the walk-on tryout process that Penn State employs in a way that would keep fellow players from being distracted by his celebrity. While nothing about Manning’s performance is convincing or good, there is a bit of a twinkle in his eye that suggests he’s genuinely pretty excited about the surprise reveal at the end of it all. The intended effect for these football boys is more in the spirit of “the elevator opens, and there’s Paul McCartney,” than “this is a real guy, Chad Powers, with a non-prosthetic face, and he wants to play football with you.” It has the vibe of being, at the very least, a nice thing. Chad Powers does not have that vibe at all. The show (and even the main character, at times, despite Chad’s gentle, affected drawl) is mean as shit. And it doesn’t even have the decency to be funny about it.
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