Chad Powers is back with a second season, all six episodes of which landed on Hulu on 3 September, a year after the show first arrived. It is built around a specific kind of shame, the sort that ends a career overnight and leaves someone with nothing left to lose. Quarterback Russ Holliday blows up his own future with one unforgivable moment, then claws his way back onto a field by becoming someone else entirely.
The idea actually started as a real stunt. Years ago, Eli Manning and his production company put together a sketch for ESPN in which the retired quarterback disguised himself and tried to sneak through college football tryouts undetected. Glen Powell picked up that concept and built it into a full series with Michael Waldron, taking on both halves of the joke himself, the disgraced star and the oddball he becomes.
What keeps the show from being a single joke stretched too thin is how much attention it pays to the team around him, a struggling program that needs Chad Powers to be good far more than it needs to know who he really is. Season two tightens that screw: more people around the South Georgia Catfish are starting to notice that their walk-on does not add up, and keeping the disguise intact through a full season becomes the plot rather than the premise.
That is the right move. The first season proved the disguise could carry six episodes; the second has to prove the show still works once the audience is in on the joke and the characters are catching up. With twelve episodes now to judge it on, it is a comedy that knows its own strengths: game-day stakes played straight, and a lead who is funnier as the oddball than as the star.
Both seasons are streaming on Hulu and Disney+ in the US, on Disney+ in Australia, and on Disney+ or Sky Go in the UK.
