Chad Powers season 2 is coming and I genuinely can’t explain why I love it this much

okay, so I need to talk about Chad Powers.

I don’t know how it happened. One minute I’m half-watching Hulu on a Tuesday, next minute I’m fully invested in a show about a football player who puts on a bad disguise and a fake Southern accent and somehow nobody catches on. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works.

Season 2 got the green light, and I have thoughts. Mostly the kind of thoughts that are just ‘yes, more of this, please, immediately.’

What even IS Chad Powers, for the uninitiated?

Chad Powers is a Hulu comedy starring Glen Powell as Russ Holliday — a hotshot quarterback whose career implodes publicly and spectacularly. His solution? Slap on a wig, adopt a totally different name, and walk on at a small college program like nobody’s going to figure it out.

It’s based on the Eli Manning sketch from ESPN+ — which, if you haven’t seen it, Eli Manning disguised himself as a fake quarterback named Chad Powers to try out for a college team. The bit went so viral they turned it into a whole show. Which is a sentence that should not make sense but here we are.

The original sketch was Manning. The show is Powell. Same ridiculous energy, bigger budget, genuine heart.

Why does this show actually work when it shouldn’t?

Here’s the thing about Chad Powers — the premise is paper-thin. Man wears disguise. Nobody notices. Hijinks. That’s it. That’s the whole show.

And yet somehow it has actual stakes? You end up caring about the team, caring about Russ figuring out who he is when nobody knows who he is, caring about whether some walk-on kid gets his shot. It sneaks up on you.

Glen Powell is also doing something interesting here. He’s playing dumb in a way that’s clearly covering for someone who is not dumb, and that specific kind of performance is really hard to pull off without being annoying. He’s not annoying. He’s deeply charming. It’s a little unfair.

Is the football actually good or is it just backdrop?

The football is backdrop — but good backdrop. It’s not trying to be a sports drama. It’s not Friday Night Lights. It knows what it is.

What the show gets right is the culture around college football. The pressure, the weird loyalty, the way entire towns hinge their identities on a program. That part rings true even when everything else is delightfully absurd.

And look, I’ll be honest — I don’t care that much about football in real life. But when you put enough character on top of the sport, I’m watching. That’s just how it works.

The disguise being bad is actually the point

People who haven’t seen it sometimes ask — how does nobody recognize him? Isn’t that dumb?

Yes. That’s the joke. And the show is in on it completely.

The wig is bad. The accent is inconsistent. Nobody looks too hard because nobody expects a famous NFL quarterback to be walking onto their practice field pretending to be a nobody from nowhere. There’s actually something a little real in that — people see what they expect to see. Russ just uses that against everyone around him.

There’s a tiny philosophical thing buried under the football comedy about identity and performance and how much of who we are is just what other people have decided we are. I don’t think the show is trying to be deep. But it kind of is anyway.

What do we know about Chad Powers season 2?

Hulu confirmed the renewal, so season 2 is happening — which is the main thing. Plot details are still pretty locked down, which honestly is fine. The first season ended in a way that left plenty of room to run with.

Glen Powell is back, which is the only thing that actually mattered. The whole enterprise is basically a Powell delivery system and everyone involved seems to know that.

The question for season 2 is how long the disguise can realistically hold, and whether they lean into the chaos of it unraveling or keep the secret alive longer than logic should allow. Personally I think the longer they drag out the reveal, the better. The tension of everyone almost figuring it out is half the fun.

Why this kind of show is so rare right now

Most TV comedies right now are either extremely dark and prestige-y or extremely loud and exhausting. Chad Powers is neither. It’s just… fun. Warm. It wants you to have a good time.

That’s rarer than it sounds. There’s a real tendency right now to mistake bleak for smart, or to think that if something is genuinely enjoyable it must be shallow. Chad Powers is proof that isn’t true.

In my piece on shows that actually deliver on their premises, I talked about how the best genre stuff knows its own rules and plays fair. Chad Powers knows exactly what game it’s playing.

The other thing — and this sounds small but it isn’t — is that the show is consistently funny. Not ‘chuckle once per episode’ funny. Actually funny, episode to episode. That’s genuinely hard to sustain and they did it.

The Glen Powell factor, which we have to address

Glen Powell is having a moment that just keeps going, and I think Chad Powers is actually a smarter career move than it looks.

Anybody can be charming in a serious role. Doing something this deliberately silly and making it work without winking too hard at the camera — that takes a specific kind of confidence. Powell has it.

In my earlier take on streaming shows worth your actual attention, I probably should have already mentioned this one. Consider this me fixing that.

He also clearly loves this project in a way that reads on screen. That matters. You can feel when an actor is just collecting a check and when they’re actually playing. This is playing.

Chad Powers season 2 is the renewal news I didn’t know I needed until I got it. Sometimes a show is just fun, and sometimes fun is the hardest thing to pull off, and sometimes a guy in a bad wig is exactly what TV needed.

I don’t know when season 2 drops yet. But I’ll be there. Probably on a Tuesday. Probably eating something I shouldn’t.

But what do I know?

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