So let me get this straight.
We’re supposed to buy that Glen Powell, a guy who looks like he was built in a lab to play fighter pilots, can slap on some rubber prosthetics stolen from his makeup artist dad and convincingly pass as a college-aged walk-on quarterback? And not just any walk-on, but one who becomes the starter for a D1 team playing against real schools like Ole Miss and Georgia?
Okay. Sure. And I’m the starting center for the Boston Celtics.
This whole Chad Powers thing on Hulu is the perfect distillation of modern entertainment. Take a five-minute viral sketch—the original Eli’s Places bit with Eli Manning at Penn State was genuinely funny, I'll give it that—and then stretch it on the rack until it’s a ten-episode “series.” It’s the content-ification of a joke. The punchline is that there is no punchline, just a streaming subscription fee.
The creators, Glen Powell and Michael Waldron, said they were tonally inspired by the movie Armageddon. You know, the one where they send a bunch of roughneck oil drillers into space to nuke an asteroid. They said they loved how it took a "ridiculous premise" and treated it with the utmost seriousness.
This is a bad comparison. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a fundamentally broken understanding of why Armageddon worked. The stakes in that movie were, you know, THE END OF ALL HUMAN LIFE. The stakes in Chad Powers are whether a fictional team called the South Georgia Catfish can beat Tennessee. It ain't the same thing. One is a planet-killer asteroid, the other is a Tuesday night on Hulu.
What this really feels like is a bunch of rich, successful guys who love football making a show for themselves. You’ve got Omaha Productions, the Manning brothers’ media empire, co-producing. Eli and Peyton themselves are consultants, making sure Glen Powell’s three-step drop looks “authentic.” Authentic? The entire show is based on a lie. The premise is a man in a costume. It’s a sports version of Mrs. Doubtfire, a fact the show literally acknowledges with a billboard gag.
Give me a break.
This is the problem with everything now. Not every funny tweet needs to be a sitcom. Not every viral video needs a cinematic universe. I swear, Hollywood executives see a TikTok of a cat playing a tiny piano and their first thought is, "How can we turn this into a three-season arc with a tragic backstory for the cat and a lucrative merchandising deal?" It's exhausting.
And offcourse they’re cramming it with every modern, terminally-online reference they can think of. A cameo from the "Hawk Tuah Girl"? References to Deuxmoi? It feels less like a story and more like a checklist of SEO keywords designed to trend on Twitter for 12 hours. It’s a show built by an algorithm, for an algorithm. All it’s missing is a subplot about the Catfish’s NIL collective being funded by a crypto scam.
I get it, sports fans are “savage” critics, and the creators wanted to meet that standard by being their own harshest critics. That’s a nice little PR line. But being your own harshest critic doesn't mean pointing out how ridiculous your idea is and then doing it anyway with a wink. It means recognizing that some ideas are best left as a one-off sketch. They saw a lightning strike with the original Eli Chad Powers bit, and now they're trying to bottle it, but all they've got is an empty jar and a lot of marketing spend...
Then again, the internet seems to be eating it up. People are already buzzing about a Season 2. Maybe I’m just the crazy one here. Maybe this is what people want—a low-stakes, high-concept comedy that doesn’t ask you to think too hard and reminds you of a thing you saw on YouTube a few years ago. Maybe the joke's on me for expecting anything more.
But I just can’t shake the feeling that we’re being sold a highlight reel instead of a game. It’s all slick production and familiar faces and the thumping echo of something that used to be original. It looks like football, it sounds like football, but it feels like a really expensive hologram.
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We're So Very Tired
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This is it. This is the peak of the content brain. A premise that was perfect for five minutes, now bloated into a multi-hour commitment because nobody has the guts to say, "No, that's enough." It's not a story; it's an echo. And we're all just supposed to sit here and applaud because it's shiny and new and stars the handsome guy from that jet movie. We get the entertainment we deserve, I guess.
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