Chad Powers is what you get when the thinnest thread of a concept gets yes-anded into a streaming series. Just as Ted Lasso began life as a promo for NBC’s English Premier League coverage, Chad Powers crawled out of a gag on Eli’s Places , Eli Manning’s post-retirement ESPN+ program, in which the former Giants quarterback hides under prosthetics to pose as an aspiring Penn State walk-on. The bit went viral, which somehow qualifies it as a viable IP, and suddenly there’s a blueprint: Plug in a marquee name (Glen Powell), hand it to a capable showrunner ( Loki ’s Michael Waldron), and shove the product through Hulu’s pipes. This is what passes as development these days, and what comes out of the Chad Powers process is mostly lousy, a corporate exercise in content alchemy that

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