Chad Powers

“Chad Powers” offers a welcome mix of cringe comedy, raunchy humor and even some sweet, odd couple moments.

This isn’t a realistic show about college football, but its absurdity stays on the right side of the line between fun and silly.

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.

As Russ bends to the genre’s sentimental rules to embrace his inner Chad, Chad Powers finds its way into a goofy end zone of comedic bliss.

Overall, Chad Powers feels like the television equivalent of a true freshman who came out of nowhere to win the prized Heisman trophy, courtesy of a fantastic leading man in Powell, tremendous supporting performances, and a story that knows exactly when to utilize the best plays for cheeky comedy or poignant drama.

Nothing about this show should work. And…yet. In all its dumb, ridiculous glory, it (mostly) does.

We’re not 100 percent sold on Chad Powers yet, but if it concentrates on the redemption arcs and steps away from the goofiness, it should be a satisfying show to watch.

Chad Powers pulls too much, too obviously from Eastbound & Down, Ted Lasso, and a bunch of other movies and shows to fully feel like its own thing, but it's a consistently funny, occasionally surprising comedy. It's a dark outlier in the Ted Lasso subgenre.

As it stands, Powell is carrying Chad Powers on his shoulders. He’s funny, charismatic, and committed, and he mastered the art of a performance within a performance in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. The writing just needs to catch up to the hilarity, originality, and conviction of Powell’s performance.

Despite a good central performance by Powell, it’s hard to really care about Russ/Chad. ... But while the comedy lacks the life-affirming positivity of Ted Lasso or the redemptive quality of Stick, there will still be plenty of viewers cheering on Chad at the end of this six-episode season.

Fails to decide if it wants to be ribald or saccharine and winds up settling for somewhere in the milquetoast middle.

There is great potential for an offbeat, bawdy comedy about one of our nation's obsessions, but "Powers" always goes for the simplistic jokes and surface-level plots.

The bizarre prosthetics and silly voice make it hard to take Chad quite as seriously as the series would like us to. .... There is a lot of loose angst flying around by the end of the season, which is obviously not, or not meant to be, the end of the story. Nothing is concluded.

If the finale is a starting point for the somewhat dark story Chad Powers actually wants to be, you can consider me truly curious. If the finale is just a contrived speed bump to over-extend what’s conventional about the show and its unpersuasive redemptive arc, I don’t like Chad Powers very much at all.

Saddled with an uninteresting jerk half the time and a muzzled non-entity the other half, there’s only a handful of moments in the first six episodes where Powell’s star power shines through.

Hulu could have made a good show in a couple years, when Powell and Waldron had more time to devote to the project. Instead, they chose to rush Chad Powers onto the field — and now, it's too late to call an audible.

Chad Powers ultimately can't decide if it wants to stay in the uplifting Ted Lasso lane or be a much broader — and at times meaner — comedy than the one it likely wouldn't exist without.

Chad Powers is, for the most part, a cynical corporate experiment, engineered within an inch of its life, but in fleeting moments it threatens to transcend itself.

“Chad Powers” is now more than a sketch, but it’s not quite all the way to being a full-fledged TV show.

If this were a heart-warming family comedy in the style of Ted Lasso, it might work. Instead, the show’s creators seem to have asked: “What if we made a version of Ted Lasso, but meaner?” Steve Zahn, as the head coach, is the only affable character.

The most irritating aspect of “Chad Powers” isn’t Powell’s rather too self-satisfied “transformation” into the title character, which is never quite believable because they have the same distinctive eye shape; nor is it the constant echoes of “Ted Lasso” and the many elements of the sports movie that have been plunked down but not sufficiently rethought. It’s that there’s a far more interesting show happening in the margins with Ricky and Jake Hudson.

Both too long (it shoulda been a movie) and too short (it doesn’t feel like anything happens), “Chad Powers” is a fumble. “Necessary Roughness” plays like a masterpiece by comparison.

Powell might have been appealing enough to make this goofy premise work if Russ and his alter ego weren’t two of the most obnoxious TV characters in recent memory—and if the show didn’t seem cobbled together from older, better sports comedies.

It doesn’t seem to know what makes the genre work.