REVIEW: Lane Kiffin Jokes Can’t Save ‘Chad Powers’ Season 2

Chad Powers Season 2 continues Omaha Productions’ Hulu Original series based on an Eli Manning skit. With Glen Powell hoping to charm the audience as Russ Holiday, who plays the titular Chad Powers, the series makes a sharp pivot away from the Manning skit’s comedy and into a sports drama. 

This is the show’s biggest sin and why it is genuinely difficult to finish watching Chad Powers Season 2: it has completely thrown away all the comedy that made the series work during its debut season. Gone is the dark humor, the biting insults, the deep-cut football jokes, and instead we’re given buzzword soup of jokes that are recognizable to anyone, with some deep cut or two sprinkled in.

The problem is that last season’s humor sounded like a tailgate on Saturday. Now it sounds like the series ran itself through a filter to clean off all its edges.   

The series is now about rehabbing Chad, making Russ into a guy who isn’t selfish, and, in doing so, sacrificing all the good comedy, too. Chad Powers Season 2 tries to rectify the fact that it is a show based on a skit that could never continue past one day. But by distancing itself instead of leaning in, it shatters any hope of suspension of disbelief. 

Chad Powers Season 2 shifts from sports comedy to a series chasing the drama and critical acclaim of Friday Night Lights.

Instead, the show bends over backward to cater to an audience incapable of watching someone who wasn’t totally good. It twists itself in knots to be Friday Night Lights without having any of the depth that series (or film, for that matter) had. The only character that routinely serves as a redeeming grace for the series is the awful woman whose booster donations are funding the team, Tricia Yaeger (Wynn Everett). 

She sucks, she’s crass, she’s classist, and she is so funny. In fact, her humor is made even funnier when you realize how much more control boosters have been given in this NIL era. Wynn Everett has never stopped being a caricature of a Southern woman who loves football with performance, and she’s the best part of the series because of it. But no one else in this series seems to have gotten that message. 

Coach Ricky Hudson (Perry Mattfeld), Danny (Frankie A. Rodriguez), Coach Hudson (Steve Zahn), Coach Byrd (Quentin Plair), and Coach Dobbs (Clayne Crawford) no longer make sense as characters. Their humor has been stunted and almost entirely eliminated, and while Gerry Dougan’s (Colton Ryan) heel-turn probably felt great in the writing room, the result is anything but. The series was a look at football field stereotypes, and that’s when it was good. Now, it’s taking itself too seriously to make any impact.  

Someone needed to invest in more lights for Chad Powers Season 2. 

The hardest thing about watching Chad Powers Season 2 as a football fan is knowing that Glen Powell loves the sport too. But where last season’s meanest and funniest jokes came from leaning into the game, this sophomore season is more concerned with finding some sort of critical success.

The cinematography is different, aiming for a sports drama instead of a sports comedy, and the writing follows suit. In fact, the official stills released for Chad Powers Season 2 look nothing like what experiencing the show was. While this works in Episode 1 of the season, with the ample amount of Remember the Titans helping it stick the landing, the rest of Chad Powers Season 2 suffers from it. The color palette is muted, the jokes are fewer, and the series seems to be chasing some sort of status that forsakes the good it had in the last season. 

Chad Powers Season 1 wasn’t bad because of its comedy; it was bad because of the tonal whiplash it lives in when romance takes center stage. The series wasn’t bad because of its teeth; it was bad because the series decided to chase more seasons with a core concept that doesn’t work as a long-form story.

This is best explained by the romance between Ricky and Chad. There are rom-com miscommunications and lies, and then there is a man pretending to be another man, sleeping with your stepmom, putting your father in the hospital, and you telling him to kill himself. The last part of the comparison is what Ricky has to forgive Chad Powers for, and to be honest, the fact that she does turns a mostly strong woman character into someone wholly dumbed down for the point of a plot that we didn’t see last season. 

It’s hard to find anything redeeming about Chad Powers Season 2. 

Now, in Chad Powers Season 2, any heart, SEC charm, and gameday dark humor have given way to a series pretending to be a prestige show. Because we all know that good review scores go to series and films that are too dark to watch on your television, with colors so muted you question whether your TV’s contrast is set too low. Even if the series bounced back in scripting, it’s just ugly to watch. 

Chad Power Season 2 does well when a good Lane Kiffin joke lands, but far too often there are moments where it feels like the writers’ room is just trying to work in every SEC and ESPN name or internet joke to take advantage of the fact that ABC (owned by Disney) has the broadcasting rights to the former, and Disney owns ESPN wholesale. Coupled with the muddied cinematography and the insincere take on college football, everything just ends up feeling bad. 

The season ends with a night game against Texas, and it is one of the most poorly lit, badly shot football games I have ever seen on the small or big screen. There is no pageantry, no bright stadium lights, and as my husband, who played football at a West Texas powerhouse, said, “Why does this game against Texas look like they’re playing in my high school stadium?”

Lifeless football and a romance that makes no sense are the hallmarks of Chad Powers Season 2. 

Where last season captured the fans, the sights, and sounds of the SEC, Chad Powers Season 2 winds up looking like a Northeastern high school trying to make football happen instead of the heart of the South. It’s just bad, and even if it could be forgiven for the lack of pageantry, I have never seen a football stadium so dark at night. When you’ve experienced Darral K Royal Stadium at night, Kyle Field at 9 pm right before a walkoff field goal against Texas, this just feels dead.

If you’ve watched videos of Death Valley as the sun sets or heard Dixieland Delight as the Crimson Tide take the field or seen “Rocky” Top belted out as the checkerboard end zone shines, there is nothing satisfying about the final moments in Chad Powers Season 2. And that’s a shame.

It may have given Glen Powell his dream of being on a football field with Texas on it too, but it’s a hollow excuse for a big game where only player silhouettes can be seen, and no life can be felt. Maybe the issue I take with the series is that I am a woman born and raised on Texas football. I baked in the sun for our home opener and felt the electricity of a stadium move through a crowd, then was brought to an epic silence at a loss.

Glen Powell’s charm has completely worn off in Chad Powers Season 2.

Chad Powers Season 1 wasn’t great, but it had some redeeming moments. The choices it made at the end of the season, turning something that should have been a mini-series into something bigger, were where it lost me. But it was a good time. Now, the series is stalled at a level that is more frustrating because of what it could be. There are moments that lock in tight on an issue in the sport.

Moments that showcase how much Powell, both in his role as Chad and as a producer and creator of the series, knows what football fans want. More often than not, though, Chad Powers Season 2 courts an audience that was never going to fall in love with it anyway, instead of catering to the football fans this series should be for.

You can’t tie yourself to the start of the College Football season and then not talk to your fans. Chad Powers Season 2 pivots to Friday Night Lights but, in the end, serves an audience that would never show up to a football game anyway. 

Chad Powers Season 2 is streaming now, exclusively on Hulu and Disney+.

Chad Powers Season 1 |