Chad Powers (Glen Powell) should probably attend class a bit more.
The Chad Powers title character is known around the Southern Georgia University campus for the “athlete” suffix of his student-athlete status. What I’m saying is he’s dumb — but in the most endearing possible way. That’s the way the Hulu comedy’s showrunner Michael Waldron (Loki) likes it.
Waldron says the “most joyful stuff” to write in Chad Powers is the (prosthetically) masked man’s bizarre, roundabout answers to personal questions that could otherwise out Powers as Russ Holliday — or at least as not a real person. The exchanges that spark joy for Waldron do the same for viewers, and they’re not as difficult to write as you might think.
“That’s why I’m writing this show because, in some ways, it’s whatever your first stupidest thought. You don’t actually even have to be funny. The character is a real cheat because he just says stupid shit, and and the comedy comes from the great actor from how Glen sells it and then everybody’s reaction to it,” Waldron told The Hollywood Reporter. “I mean it is a precise thing and it’s like, ‘Well how stupid is it?’ It was fun this season to interrogate it a little bit. It’s like, as Russ says to Ricky, ‘Chad is stupid. I’m making deliberate creative choices.’ Now, I think that’s probably just [Chad] retroactively justifying a crappy performance.”
“I could write Chad as a character forever,” he added. “I’ll be really sad to not get to write him.”
With just six 30-minute episodes per season (by design), some of these idiotic run-on stories inevitably hit the cutting room floor.
“In [the season two premiere], there was a thing that we cut out where he’s in the trainer’s room when he gets brought back, and he’s— it’s so stupid,” Waldron said. “He’s talking about how he’s like having to manually beat his heart. How all of his automatic body processes are no longer automatic. So he says, like, ‘I’m controlling the individual enzymes in my gut.’ It’s just so self indulgent and stupid. So we cut it. But to watch Glen perform it on the day was hysterical.”
Should Waldron and Powell get their way, and they probably will, Chad Powers will get one more season from Hulu. If season two is Russ/Chad in a Bruce Wayne/Batman parallel, as Waldron told his writing staff, season three, the College Football Playoffs, will explore more of a Peter Parker/Spider-Man duality. Those relationships are more different than they might first appear.
“This season Russ is actually much more comfortable because he’s kind of had that catharsis at the end of the first season, where he’s like, ‘I’m happier as Chad,’” Waldron said. “The emotional arc of this season I would say is about him starting to take steps toward the idea of well, can you ever be okay being Russ again? That’s what Ricky is challenging him with, reminding him they’re the same guy.”
That’s the DC Comics parallel from the Marvel writer.
“In a third season… do you have to do Peter Parker and Spider-Man, where Chad has to say that Russ is part of his life in some way? Will we have to embrace that convention?” Waldron posed. “Maybe. We’ve always talked about that.”
Tom Holland in Spiderman, Glen Powell as Russ Holliday on Chad Powers, and Robert Pattison as Bruce Wayne.
Chuck Zlotnick/Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection; Disney/Daniel Delgado Jr.; Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection
It is rare the co-creators of a series want said show to end after just 18 episodes, but that “was always the intent” for Chad Powers, Powell told THR.
“One of my pet peeves on TV is when people don’t stick the landing,” he continued. “When people draw things out. I’m like, ‘Come on!’ When you have a story that ends perfectly, it just makes me so happy.”
For someone with roughly zero free time on his hands, the busy movie and TV star (and University of Texas student!) has given the Chad Powers timeline a ton of thought. “The lie” of Chad Powers the character could not possibly make it through an entire college football offseason, he realized pretty early on.
“When you have the amount of eyeballs on this one man at the center of this team in South Georgia, as sort of the legend of Chad Powers grows, this lie becomes harder and harder to pull off in front of the world,” Powell said. “You want to honor that. It’s kind of the fun of the show.”
So Waldron will be sad to no longer write Chad poorly tap-dancing around inquiries into his background, and whatever happens in the Natty (National Championship) — assuming we get that — the conclusion of Chad Powers will be bittersweet for fans. Powell asks you to trust the process.
“We have a very exciting culmination in mind. So that’s the plan,” he said. “I’m really happy with where it’s all heading.”
