Gay panic jokes aside, ‘Chad Powers’ has something interesting to say about modern masculinity

Artistic intention is a tricky thing. Depending on how deliberate, careful, and creative an artist is, the intention behind their work may or may not come through. More commonly, that intention is cast aside when the viewer interprets that art for themselves.

One person’s thoughtful meditation on class and race is another person’s propaganda.

After watching two episodes of Hulu’s Chad Powers, I’m not entirely sure about their intentions, though I can make some Ted Lasso-informed guesses. But after digging through the dick jokes, gay panic humor, and copious references to “chewing shit,” I was fascinated by the political and cultural dynamics at play between the titular character (or, more aptly, the character pretending to be the titular character) and the Georgia college football program he runs to in search of redemption.

Is Chad Powers a good TV show? Two episodes in, I’m not sure, but it has already received numerous positive reviews. It very obviously wants to be the American Ted Lasso, and the plot and characters of this show have been shaped around the bones of that one, though the skin hangs loose in many places.

To me, it feels like a brute-force attempt to recapture the heart and joy of the Jason Sudeikis series through over-the-top musical cues and unearned emotional moments. Based on what I’ve seen, I remain skeptical of its ability to suss out those kinds of emotions from such an unlikable protagonist. But to be fair, most TV shows take a season to really find themselves.

Almost as interesting as the show is the time at which it’s been brought to the world. It would have been decidedly easy for Chad Powers to lean into the current American drumbeat and see the main character’s macho ostentatiousness as a positive or a norm worth striving for. A red-coded Ted Lasso, if you will. 

Instead, and here’s where the show really gets interesting, it does the opposite. It appears to have a desire to Trojan Horse its way into that subculture to show how puerile it is. 

Within the first two scenes of the show, we learn that Russ Holliday (Glen Powell) is a douchebag of the highest order. In the first scene, we understand this literally when he grandstands to cost his team the Rose Bowl and then punches the father of a child dying from cancer. In the second scene, Holliday’s douchebaggery is driven home by several indicators. He’s heavily invested in cryptocurrency, drives a Cybertruck, is a vaccine skeptic, and is a conspiracy theorist.

These are all presented as examples to show us he sucks as a human being. What’s fascinating about those choices is that, if you allow me to generalize for a moment, these examples are all very conservative-coded. Holliday is even shown hanging out with Hailey “Hawk Tuah” Welch, herself a noted crypto enthusiast who became a conservative culture icon.

Both of the first two episodes make a particular meal out of Holliday’s COVID denial and conspiratorial thinking. At a time when a large percentage of Americans are skeptical of vaccines and voted for an administration that spouts conspiracy theories as policy, that’s notable. To say nothing of the fact that one of American football’s biggest stars is also one of its leading vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists.

It’s worth noting that Holliday lives in Los Angeles with a father who works in the entertainment industry, specifically in Hollywood. While certainly not unheard of, it’s not what we typically associate with conservative-coded locations. That’s what makes it all the more fascinating as a deliberate choice.

In one of the sweatiest plot delivery systems I’ve ever seen, Holliday is transporting his Oscar-nominated father’s prosthetics to a Hollywood studio when he spies a billboard for Mrs. Doubtfire (why is a billboard for a 1993 film at the front gates of a movie studio in 2025?) while also watching a TikTok video where Stephen A. Smith explains that the Southern Georgia Catfish college football program are holding open tryouts for a quarterback. He absconds with the prosthetics, assumes the name Chad Powers, and is allowed to join tryouts despite lacking any paperwork to prove he’s a student. He ultimately makes the team by the end of the first episode.

First hearing that the school is called Southern Georgia and their mascot is the Catfish, one imagines a small-time college football program in the vein of The Waterboy’s South-Central Louisiana State Mud Dogs, steeped in Southern culture and featuring a ragtag collection of regional stereotypes. Instead, we’re presented with perhaps the most liberally-coded Southern college football program you’ve ever seen.

The head coach, played by Steve Zahn (who better be well-paid for all of this), is a big pushover. His presumably FBS-level coaching staff includes his daughter, Ricky (played by Perry Mattfeld). Southern belle Tricia (Wynn Everett) is supposed to represent the power-hungry boosters, but she clearly comes with a heart of gold that will undoubtedly unfurl in the coming episodes. Even Gerry Dougan (Colton Ryan), the God-loving sweetheart who wants to be everyone’s friend and help whenever he can, is at odds with the current conservative-minded notions of aggro-masculinity and good vs. evil religiousity.

So disconnected is the football program from its stereotypical regional identity that when Holliday’s Chad Powers character is revealed to be a home-schooled West Virginia kid who spent most of his life becoming “one with the woods,” they have no idea what to make of him. This is a world of state-of-the-art practice facilities and water-balloon fights on lakeside mansion properties.

So what to make of all this? I’m not entirely sure, other than to bring it back to the original point about artistic intention. Most choices one makes when creating a TV show are deliberate. Just as the Catfish mascot is a nod to what Chad Powers is doing, how that character’s egotistic behavior is framed for the audience is not accidental. And neither is the way the Southern Georgia characters are presented as a counterbalance to him.

That isn’t to say that Chad Powers is some thoughtful text on the nature of American cultural norms. I was under the impression we’d left TV shows and movies built around gay panic jokes in the 2010s, but they’re alive and well here. I also fear for Danny (Frankie Rodriguez), the gay-coded school mascot who becomes Russ/Chad’s confidant for flimsy reasons. I’m not sure if the show has the ability to handle that character well.

Ultimately, I’m curious to see where the show takes its lead character and how his experiences not only change him but also how that is reflected in his interests, hobbies, and modes of transportation. If those aspects of the character begin to change, it will add another layer to how the show’s creators view these objects in the cultural discussion and what it means for a young man to detach from them.