You don’t have to look too hard at Disney+’s new sitcom to see the stitches. This is a flagrant Frankenstein of a show; a grab bag of elements from things that are already incredibly popular. It’s a good-natured sports comedy in the mould of Ted Lasso. Its star is Glen Powell, a man with the fairly miraculous ability to unite both warring sides of 2025 America. It shamelessly lifts the plot of Mrs Doubtfire (the second highest grossing film worldwide in 1993, fact fans) and, according to the credits, it is based on a funny video of an American football player that went viral in 2022.
It is thin gruel indeed, the sort of programme you imagine gets created after a particularly desperate ChatGPT session. And yet, despite this, Chad Powers is actually good. Better than good, in fact. It’s a funny, touching, deliberately uncomfortable character piece with one of the most magnetic central performances in recent memory. How annoying.
Obviously, it helps that it was created by Powell (along with writer Michael Waldron, whose current gig is writing the Avengers franchise) because, viewed from afar, it looks like an attempt to marry the two sides of his public persona. Chad Powers follows the explosive bottoming out of a cocky young football player named Russ Holliday. One minute, Holliday has the world at his feet. The next he has lost a championship, punched a fan and injured a young wheelchair-bound cancer patient, all in full view of the wider world.
In other words, the show really wants you to hate him. He’s the walking definition of obnoxiousness, all Cybertrucks, crypto talk and chest tattoos. It’s a role Powell knows well, an extension of his swaggeringly unbearable Top Gun character.
However, salvation comes when Holliday decides to start afresh, by stealing his dad’s prosthetics, moving to Georgia and passing himself off as a sweetly naive, aw-shucks college player called Chad Powers. Again, given Powell’s uncanny ability to hit Middle America right in its plaid-wearing heart, this also seems deliberate.
A premise like this has a lot of heavy lifting to do, so it’s smart that Powell and Waldron have chosen to cut almost every corner imaginable to get to the action faster. The nod to Mrs Doubtfire is as transparent as possible, coming after Russ Holliday (and I promise this is true) looks directly at a poster for Mrs Doubtfire. Similarly, the college team he signs up for under a fake identity is called the Catfish. If there’s one thing the show wants you to hate more than Russ Holliday, it is the concept of subtext.
And yet the final result is improbably irresistible. While the early episodes are charmingly goofy – a vast amount of time is given to the problem of how to shower with your teammates when your face is covered in prosthetics – things quickly get deeper as the line between Holliday and Powers starts to blur. Was the Chad Powers persona created to get Holliday back into the spotlight, or because Holliday was sick of himself?
Throughout the season, Holliday blames his demise on circumstance; if he hadn’t messed up in that one game, he’d be king of the world. But there’s a sense that, like Walter White before him, his downfall was entirely caused by a personality flaw. If he didn’t knock the cancer victim out of his wheelchair during that match, his arrogance and egotism would have undone him elsewhere.
By the end of the season, we’re left with some unexpectedly complex character work, as nobody involved, himself included, seems to know where Holliday ends and Powers begins. The technical work this must have involved on the part of Powell, whose various accents keep fading and blurring into each other as his identity unravels, is staggering.
What we’re left with is about as far from Ted Lasso as you can get. It’s a mutant redemption story with a satisfyingly chewy moral core: can you truly be redeemed if it involves lying to every single person on the planet? All this, plus it manages to be funny and charming. Chad Powers is a rare feat. And remember, they managed to get all this from a viral video. What a magic trick.