TL;DR: Chad Powers may look like a dumb Ted Lasso knockoff on paper, but Glen Powell transforms it into one of the most magnetic and surprising shows of the year. Goofy, uncomfortable, and weirdly profound.

I went into Chad Powers with every expectation of hating it. Not just disliking. Not just sighing at another piece of “content” Frankensteined together from pop culture parts. I mean the kind of full-body cringe where you can feel your soul trying to backpedal out of your own skin. Because on paper, this Disney+ sitcom doesn’t just look derivative—it looks like the AI-generated fever dream of an overcaffeinated executive trying to smash Ted Lasso, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Glen Powell’s jawline into one digestible subscription-ready package.

And yet.

And yet.

Somehow, against the laws of God, narrative structure, and good taste, Chad Powers works. No—scratch that. It sings. It’s one of those bewildering cultural artifacts where you can see every single stitch in the patchwork quilt, but the thing still keeps you warm anyway. And the reason it works—why it doesn’t just collapse into a pile of awkward prosthetics and recycled story beats—is Glen Powell.

Because Powell doesn’t just star in this show. He bends it around himself, reshapes it, fills it with an electricity that shouldn’t belong in a sitcom built from secondhand parts. His performance here is one of the most magnetic I’ve seen in years, the kind of turn that makes you remember why actors exist in the first place.

This is not Ted Lasso with a fake mustache. This is not Mrs. Doubtfire goes to college football. This is not some cursed viral-video-to-series pipeline. This is… well, it’s Chad Powers. And if you give it the chance, it will worm its way into your head and refuse to leave.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Chad Powers looks dumb as hell on paper.

The basic premise: a disgraced hotshot NFL quarterback, Russ Holliday (played by Powell), blows up his career in the most spectacular way possible. He loses a championship game, punches a fan, and—brace yourself for this one—accidentally injures a wheelchair-bound kid with cancer. It’s the kind of scandal so cartoonishly bad it feels like something written in a Reddit thread that starts with, “What’s the worst possible way to tank a career?”

Naturally, he’s canceled. Out. Done. Persona non grata.

So what does he do? He steals some prosthetics from his dad, cooks up a new identity, and reinvents himself as “Chad Powers,” a guileless, small-town aw-shucks college football hopeful. He enrolls at a podunk Georgia college, joins their team (the Catfish, in a bit of on-the-nose naming), and tries to start over.

Yes. That is literally the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire if Robin Williams had decided to fake being a college linebacker instead of a Scottish nanny.

And yes, the show knows exactly what it’s doing—it even lampshades itself with a wink at a Mrs. Doubtfire poster, just in case you thought they were trying to be subtle. Spoiler: they are never, ever trying to be subtle.

This should be insufferable. It should be groan-inducing. It should feel like it was generated after someone fed ChatGPT the words “viral video,” “sports sitcom,” and “middle America.” And yet—I’ll keep coming back to this—it somehow clicks.

The reason it works is because Glen Powell doesn’t just play Russ Holliday and Chad Powers. He wrestles them, juggles them, blurs them, tears them apart, and stitches them back together in ways that should collapse but somehow don’t.

Russ Holliday is everything you hate about modern sports culture in one smug package: he drives a Cybertruck, shills crypto, and has chest tattoos that feel designed by an algorithm trying to approximate “alpha male energy.” He is unbearable, and Powell plays him with a level of smug toxicity that feels one espresso shot away from his Top Gun: Maverick character.

Chad Powers, by contrast, is the persona he builds out of prosthetics and fake accents: all wide-eyed sincerity, small-town charm, and goofy naiveté. And at first, the bit is played for laughs—there’s even a whole running gag about how he showers without revealing the prosthetics to his teammates.

But here’s the twist: Powell doesn’t let Chad stay just a gag. Slowly, deliberately, he starts blending Russ and Chad together until you—and he—aren’t quite sure where one ends and the other begins. Is Chad Powers just a mask Russ is wearing to get back in the game? Or is it the man he always wished he could be, the version of himself he never let out until he was forced to?

Watching Powell shift between these identities—sometimes in the same scene, sometimes in the same sentence—is mesmerizing. His accents slip, his body language mutates, and suddenly you’re not sure whether you’re watching a sitcom or a character study that wandered in from a much more serious drama.

It’s not just comedy. It’s not just farce. It’s identity horror, redemption melodrama, and screwball football sitcom rolled into one.

What makes Chad Powers fascinating is how quickly it shapeshifts.

The early episodes lean hard into slapstick. Prosthetic mishaps. Locker room hijinks. The “how long can he keep the secret” tension. It’s goofy, low-stakes fun, almost like a Disney Channel original movie that accidentally got a bigger budget.

But then the show does something sneaky. It lets the comedy fade just enough to reveal the darker undercurrents. By midseason, the laughs get tighter in your throat, the discomfort lingers longer. Suddenly the premise isn’t just about whether Russ can pull off the disguise—it’s about whether redemption is even possible when it’s built on a lie.

And the show doesn’t let him off easy. Russ insists he only lost everything because of bad luck—that one game, that one incident. But the truth is gnarlier. Like Walter White before him, his downfall isn’t circumstantial. It’s who he is. Arrogant. Entitled. Self-destructive. Chad isn’t saving him; Chad is exposing him.

By the finale, the show stops being about football at all. It becomes a tug-of-war between two identities: Russ Holliday, the toxic egomaniac who ruined his life, and Chad Powers, the sweet, fake persona who may or may not be more “real” than the original. The performance Powell gives in these final episodes is staggering—the accents slipping, the mannerisms collapsing, the character unraveling before your eyes.

It would be easy to dismiss Chad Powers as a Ted Lasso knockoff. After all, both are sports comedies on streaming platforms that drench themselves in heart and charm. But Chad Powers is no cozy pep talk.

Ted Lasso was built on optimism, sincerity, and the healing power of kindness. Chad Powers is built on lies, prosthetics, and the question of whether you can trick yourself into becoming a better person. Ted is warm honey tea. Chad is moonshine poured into a Gatorade bottle.

There’s no inspirational locker-room monologue here. Instead, there’s a prosthetic nose slowly slipping off as a man realizes he doesn’t know who he is anymore.

And honestly? I kind of love that.

Final Thoughts

I went into Chad Powers ready to roll my eyes into the next time zone. What I got instead was one of the strangest, funniest, most unexpectedly moving sitcoms in recent memory.

It’s messy. It’s goofy. It’s deliberately uncomfortable. And it is completely, utterly irresistible.

Glen Powell has delivered a performance that doesn’t just hold the show together—it elevates it, bends it into something bigger than the sum of its very obvious parts. Chad Powers isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a prosthetic-covered fever dream that somehow reveals the realest truths about who we are and who we wish we could be.