There are plenty of TV comedies built around a joke that sounds hilarious for about five minutes and exhausting for an entire season. Chad Powers looked dangerously close to becoming one of them.
A disgraced quarterback. A ridiculous fake identity. Prosthetic makeup. College football. Glen Powell running around pretending to be a completely different person. On paper, it could have been a one-joke series stretched far beyond its natural lifespan.
And yet, here we are.
Chad Powers Season 2 is actually better than I expected it to be. The disguise is still ridiculous, Powell is still having an obvious blast with the Chad persona, and the South Georgia Catfish are still the kind of fictional football team where chaos seems to follow them into every room. But the second season finally understands that the funniest part of Russ Holliday’s story isn’t the wig or the fake teeth.
It’s the fact that Russ has created a version of himself that people genuinely like more than the original.
That gives Season 2 something the first season only occasionally touched: emotional weight.
The new six-episode season premieres on Hulu on September 3, 2026, with every episode available at once. That binge-friendly structure turns out to be a surprisingly good fit for the story, which plays less like six separate sitcom adventures and more like one increasingly ridiculous football disaster.
And yes, I enjoyed it.
Chad Powers Season 2 Has Finally Found Its Real Story
The basic setup hasn’t changed.
Russ Holliday, once a talented college quarterback, completely wrecked his career through arrogance, terrible behavior, and one very public mistake. Years later, he’s desperate for another shot. His solution is completely normal, obviously: transform himself physically, invent a fake identity, put on an enormous amount of prosthetic makeup, and walk onto a struggling college football team as Chad Powers.
Because that’s what any reasonable person would do.
Season 1 leaned heavily on the absurdity of the setup. Season 2 is more interested in what happens when the ridiculous plan actually works.
The South Georgia Catfish aren’t just surviving anymore. They’re winning.
Suddenly Chad is becoming a legitimate college football star, and that’s where things get much more interesting. Russ spent years dreaming about getting his old life back, only to discover that the only version of himself capable of achieving it is a fictional person.
That’s a much better conflict than simply asking whether someone will recognize him.
Now the question becomes: how long can Russ keep living as Chad before he loses track of who he actually is?
That gives the comedy some teeth.
Glen Powell Is Carrying This Thing — and Having Way Too Much Fun
Let’s be honest: Chad Powers doesn’t work without Glen Powell.
The performance could have become incredibly annoying. Chad is loud, enthusiastic, weirdly confident and constantly operating at about 140 percent energy. Powell could easily have pushed the character into cartoon territory.
Instead, he gives Chad just enough humanity to make the whole thing work.
What I liked most in Season 2 is the contrast between Russ and Chad. Powell doesn’t play them as two completely unrelated characters. You can still see Russ hiding underneath Chad’s exaggerated smile, particularly when things go wrong.
And things go wrong constantly.
The prosthetics become part of the performance rather than simply a visual joke. Russ is sweating through them. He’s dealing with injuries. He’s trying to maintain the fake identity while cameras, coaches, teammates and media attention are increasingly focused on him.
There are moments where you almost forget you’re watching a guy in a ridiculous disguise.
Then Chad says something completely insane and you’re immediately reminded.
That’s the sweet spot.
Powell also has surprisingly good dramatic instincts here. The quieter scenes, especially those involving Ricky, give the character a vulnerable side that the louder comedy doesn’t always reveal.
Ricky and Russ Are Becoming the Heart of the Show
Perry Mattfeld’s Ricky gets significantly more to do this time around, and that’s a smart decision.
Ricky isn’t simply the person helping Russ maintain the Chad operation. She’s increasingly the only person who knows the entire truth, which puts an enormous amount of pressure on their relationship.
There is an interesting romantic tension developing between them, but what works better for me is the trust.
Think about the situation from Ricky’s perspective. She’s watching someone she knows completely reinvent himself and become increasingly successful because of a lie. Every new victory makes the eventual collapse potentially worse.
That’s a pretty terrible secret to carry around.
The scenes where Russ drops the Chad voice and actually talks to Ricky are some of the strongest material in the season. They also help prevent the show from becoming an endless parade of football jokes.
Coach Hudson Is Getting Suspicious
Steve Zahn remains one of the biggest comedy weapons in the series.
As Coach Jake Hudson, Zahn walks a fine line between exhausted football coach, suspicious parent and guy who looks like he’s one bad afternoon away from losing his mind.
Season 2 gives him a much more interesting job in the story.
He’s starting to notice things.
Chad’s behavior doesn’t always make sense. His background is suspicious. His personality doesn’t quite line up with what the coaching staff thinks they know about him. And now that the Catfish are attracting national attention, every strange detail becomes more dangerous.
I particularly enjoyed this aspect because the show doesn’t treat Hudson’s suspicion as a dumb sitcom obstacle. He has legitimate reasons to be concerned.
The closer the Catfish get to the College Football Playoff, the harder it becomes to hide anything.
And that’s where the season gets properly tense.
The College Football Playoff Raises the Stakes
Season 2’s biggest upgrade is scale.
The first season had the energy of an underdog college football story. This time, the Catfish are heading toward something much bigger.
The College Football Playoff becomes the finish line, and suddenly Russ isn’t just trying to help a mediocre team win games. He’s trying to maintain an impossible secret while becoming one of the most talked-about players in college football.
That’s a nightmare scenario.
National media attention means interviews. Interviews mean questions. More cameras mean more opportunities for someone to recognize Russ. Injuries create additional problems. Background checks and drug testing add another layer of anxiety.
Even the physical disguise becomes a liability.
There’s something inherently funny about a quarterback desperately trying to keep his face from falling apart while playing competitive football, but the show also gets mileage out of the darker implication: Russ literally cannot afford to be himself.
That’s the idea that sticks with you after the jokes are over.
The Football Actually Looks Good
I wasn’t expecting Chad Powers to take its football seriously enough to impress me.
It does.
The games are filmed with considerably more energy than your average comedy series. The camera work gives the plays room to breathe instead of chopping everything into frantic close-ups. Stadium environments make the games feel larger, and the production clearly understands that football has its own visual language.
The involvement of Peyton and Eli Manning’s Omaha Productions helps here.
You can feel the difference in the football terminology, locker-room atmosphere and general understanding of how college programs operate. The show isn’t pretending to be a hardcore sports drama, but it knows enough about football to make the comedy land.
That’s important.
A football comedy doesn’t need to be realistic in every detail. It just needs to feel like the people making it understand the sport.
The Binge Release Actually Makes Sense
Hulu dropping all six episodes on September 3 is an interesting change from the first season’s weekly rollout.
Normally, I’m not automatically sold on binge releases. Weekly episodes can give comedies more time to breathe, and half-hour shows often benefit from having individual episodes become their own little events.
But Season 2 feels built for bingeing.
The story has a clear escalation:
- The Catfish start winning.
- Chad attracts more attention.
- Russ has more people watching him.
- Coach Hudson becomes increasingly suspicious.
- The disguise becomes harder to maintain.
- The playoff pressure keeps climbing.
Watching those problems stack up one after another makes the season feel like a six-part pressure cooker.
I could absolutely see someone saying, “I’ll just watch one episode,” and then realizing two hours later that they’ve finished the entire thing.
Where Chad Powers Season 2 Falls Short
It’s not perfect.
The biggest issue is simple: six episodes aren’t enough for everything the season wants to do.
The story expands. The supporting cast gets more attention. New rivalries appear. The Catfish’s football ambitions become bigger. Russ’s personal problems become more complicated.
But the episode count doesn’t really give all of those ideas enough room.
Some secondary conflicts arrive and disappear quickly, almost as if the writers realize they have another major Russ problem waiting around the corner.
I wouldn’t call this a deal-breaker. The main story remains coherent, and the pacing is rarely dull. Still, I kept thinking that an eight-episode order could have allowed the ensemble to breathe a little more.
Quentin Plair’s Coach Byrd, for example, brings a different energy to the coaching staff, while characters such as Tricia Yeager and Danny add plenty to the team environment. There’s enough material here for a bigger ensemble story.
Instead, the show keeps pulling the camera back toward Russ.
That’s understandable. He’s Glen Powell in a ridiculous disguise. Of course the camera comes back to him.
Natalie Holt’s Score Deserves More Credit
One thing I didn’t expect to notice as much as I did was the music.
Natalie Holt’s score helps balance the show’s two personalities.
The football material gets the expected triumphant energy, while the scenes involving Russ’s secret lean into more nervous, tense electronic sounds.
That contrast works because Chad Powers itself is constantly switching gears.
One minute you’re laughing at a completely absurd locker-room situation. The next, you’re watching Russ panic because someone is asking one question too many.
The music quietly tells you when the joke is becoming a problem.
My Verdict: Better Than the Premise Has Any Right to Be
I’m still not going to pretend Chad Powers is high art.
It isn’t.
It’s a goofy sports comedy about a guy wearing an absurd disguise so he can play college football again. The premise is inherently ridiculous, and the show knows it.
But Season 2 is much smarter about what it does with that ridiculous premise.
Instead of simply repeating the original joke, the series asks what happens when the fake identity becomes more successful than the real one. Russ finally gets the attention he wanted, but he can’t enjoy it honestly. Every touchdown makes the secret more dangerous. Every interview makes exposure more likely. Every relationship makes the eventual truth harder to hide.
That’s good sitcom storytelling.
Glen Powell is excellent, Steve Zahn is reliably hilarious, Perry Mattfeld gets stronger material, and the football sequences have enough authenticity to keep the sports side from feeling like window dressing.
The six-episode structure is both a strength and a weakness, but for me the momentum wins.
Chad Powers Season 2 is funny, surprisingly tense and considerably more emotionally grounded than I expected.
If you liked Season 1, there’s little reason not to binge this one.
And if you dismissed the show as “Glen Powell wearing a bad wig,” I’d give it another shot.
There’s considerably more going on underneath the latex.
Chad Powers Season 2 Rating: 8.5/10
Best for: College football fans, sports comedies, Glen Powell fans, character-driven sitcoms and anyone who enjoys watching a ridiculous secret become progressively harder to maintain.
Biggest strength: Glen Powell’s dual performance and the stronger Russ/Chad conflict.
Biggest weakness: Six episodes leave some supporting storylines feeling underdeveloped.
Verdict: A chaotic, surprisingly heartfelt sophomore season that turns a viral-style comedy premise into a genuinely entertaining sports series.
