- Network: HULU
- Series Premiere Date: Sep 30, 2025
Critic Reviews
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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.
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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.
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Fails to decide if it wants to be ribald or saccharine and winds up settling for somewhere in the milquetoast middle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“Chad Powers” is now more than a sketch, but it’s not quite all the way to being a full-fledged TV show.
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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.
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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.