'Chad Powers' Season 2 Is Officially Much Closer to 'Breaking Bad' Than 'Mrs. Doubtfire' | Review

Hulu's Chad Powers had a lot working against it from the start. The original premise revolves around a quarterback who disguises himself with extensive prosthetic and makeup work to try out for a college football team, but Eli Manning's ESPN+ docuseries, Eli's Places, never had the opportunity to explore the story beyond that one-off skit. Enter Michael Waldron (Loki, Rick and Morty) and one of Hollywood's leading men of the moment, Glen Powell, who found a way to take what seemed like easy comedic fodder and expand it into a series that held a lot of potential.

Yet, the very foundation of Chad Powers' goofy persona is built on a house of cards, and while Season 1 was more willing to lean into the humor that his exaggerated mannerisms and on-the-fly improvisation could produce, Season 2 revolves primarily around the tension of Russ Holliday (Powell) preserving his biggest secret — and how one wrong move could threaten to destroy it all. It's a genre shift that puts Chad Powers more firmly in Breaking Bad territory than Mrs. Doubtfire, and it may not pay off for every viewer, especially if you've mostly been tuning in for the laughs.

What Is 'Chad Powers' Season 2 About?

On the heels of the revelation that Chad Powers, supposedly wunderkind quarterback for the South Georgia Catfish, is actually the once-disgraced Oregon quarterback Russ Holliday, Season 2 primarily centers around the pressure that continues to mount, both on and off the football field. As far as the Catfish's season is concerned, they've been on a tear lately — even if the likelihood of beating Georgia in Athens feels like a bit of a stretch — and now the conversation has turned to whether Chad Powers can lead his team to a national championship.

Outside their quarterback, other prominent members of the team are navigating both professional and personal dilemmas. In the wake of a heart attack that nearly ended everything, head coach Jake Hudson (Steve Zahn) finds himself on more uncertain ground between lingering health concerns and the possibility that too much stress could put him right back in the hospital. His daughter, assistant coach Ricky Hudson (Perry Mattfeld), has been brought in on Russ and Danny's (Frankie A. Rodriguez) scheme, much to her chagrin, because the alternative — ratting them out — would vacate all the Catfish's wins so far, ensuring an official end to their season before it's really started. Tricia Yeager (Wynn Everett), the team's biggest booster, is willing to go to extremes to ensure the ultimate victory, while Gerry Dougan (Colton Ryan), the Catfish's backup quarterback, becomes increasingly suspicious of the guy sitting at QB1 and ends up personally determined to knock Chad Powers off the pedestal everyone else has put him on.

'Chad Powers' Season 2 Feels More Like a Crime Thriller Than a Sports Comedy

Much of Chad Powers Season 1 felt like an homage to the sports comedy genre at its cultural peak, and its humor ran the gamut from hilariously irreverent to woefully outdated, with some jokes unquestionably landing better than others. Because Powell proved so game to don a bunch of prosthetics and make himself the punchline in countless instances, the show could coast on his ability to delightfully disappear into Chad Powers, even as the stakes became increasingly unbelievable. Yet the series' decision to lean so hard into comedy meant Season 1 could get away with more than one emotional uppercut to surprise the audience. When Russ tearfully confessed that he preferred being Chad Powers over himself, it landed because of how drastically it contrasted with the delightful goofiness Powell had been embracing for several episodes. Similarly, the finale face-off between Russ and Ricky became a breathlessly brutal exchange, with harmful sentiments expressed in the heat of the moment that seemed impossible to take back once unleashed.

What ultimately made Season 1 work is the same reason that Season 2 mostly feels like an evolution in the wrong direction. If the first six episodes of Chad Powers sit as evidence that the show needs to root itself in comedy for the more dramatic moments to shine, the second batch of six (all of which were provided for review) offers very little comedic respite from the drama. Instead of building jokes around the question of how long Russ will be able to maintain this ruse, the show just keeps raising the stakes, with the fear of being caught perpetually hanging over not just Chad Powers' lead but everyone who's been roped into his deception. The problem is that, without the right dose of humor to ease all that tension, Season 2 just becomes a nerve-wracking viewing experience, with its most prominent storyline taking a sinister turn that places the show much closer to a crime thriller than a sports comedy.

'Chad Powers' Season 2 Is Still Boosted by an Excellent Ensemble

Amid Chad Powers' game-changing genre shift, Season 2 provides more supporting players with the opportunity to flex their strengths. Mattfeld continues to bring dimension to a role that could have easily been reduced to a mere love interest, especially as Ricky finds herself torn between staying with the Catfish to help preserve the illusion of Chad Powers and seizing a professional opportunity that would represent a major step up in her career. Yet just when you think her entire arc will be defined by personal melodrama, Mattfeld catches you off guard with impeccable comedic timing — even if much of it is rooted in Ricky's own exasperation. While Zahn, by contrast, doesn't get as many opportunities to meet Powell's antics with a straight face, his performance as the physically and mentally wearied Coach Hudson plumbs new emotional depths this season, grounding the story in relatable weight.

Frankly, what mostly impedes Chad Powers' greater transformation on a genre level is the season's overall runtime. A breezy six episodes isn't necessarily an issue when the story is more lighthearted on the whole, but that same count in Season 2 doesn't allow the show to really come up for air, especially once the strategy to protect Chad Powers from being unmasked runs into a particularly twisted obstacle. It might have been easy to laugh at Gerry's idiosyncratic behavior when he was only really positioned as an object of ridicule, but the character sinks to truly unsettling lows in his personal mission to uncover what's really going on, so much so that it results in the show's biggest fan favorites resorting to dishonest tactics. By the end of the season, you might not want either side to win, although perhaps that's the whole point.

Fortunately, Season 2 wraps up in a way that builds anticipation for what comes next, but that ticking-clock element means that Chad Powers definitely has a built-in shelf life as a series. In an ideal world, if Waldron and Powell get the chance to tackle what the finale intriguingly tees up, the show only needs one more season to deliver a definitive conclusion to this unpredictable and increasingly dark journey. The biggest question hanging over Chad Powers by the end of Season 2 isn't whether the Catfish will get to hoist that national championship trophy at the end of it all, but whether viewers will still be rooting for them to even make it that far.

Chad Powers Season 2 premieres September 3 on Hulu.