So they finally did it. They took a five-minute joke and stretched it onto a TV-MA rack until it screamed for mercy. The new Hulu series Chad Powers dropped this week, and it’s exactly what you’d expect when a boardroom decides to reverse-engineer a viral moment.

Let’s be real. The original Eli’s Places sketch was funny because it was short, stupid, and unexpected. Eli Manning, a guy with the personality of a particularly beige filing cabinet, puts on a bad wig and some latex and fools a bunch of college kids for a few minutes. It was a perfect little internet gem. A disposable chuckle.

But this is 2025. We don’t do "disposable" anymore. We do intellectual property. We do franchises. We take the funny little sketch, send it to a lab, and pump it so full of Hollywood growth hormone that it becomes a lumbering, R-rated monster.

The Celebrity Cash-In Disguised as a Football Movie

"The Greatest Football Experience"

I read that the creators, Glen Powell and Michael Waldron, said their goal was to create the "greatest football experience... that people have ever seen."

Let me translate that from Hollywood-PR-speak for you: "We hope the football guys don't notice this is just Mrs. Doubtfire in pads."

They say they were their own harshest critics because "sports fans are savage." Give me a break. That’s the kind of line a writer comes up with to sound self-aware while doing the least self-aware thing imaginable. If you really respected that "savage" audience, you might have realized the joke had a five-minute lifespan for a reason. Instead, you cast a movie star, Glen Powell, as a "canceled" QB named Russ Holliday who gets the brilliant idea for his disguise from a billboard. It’s a lazy premise. No, 'lazy' doesn’t cut it—it’s a creatively bankrupt premise built on the hope that the Top Gun: Maverick glow will blind everyone to the fact that there’s just no there there.

And offcourse the Mannings are there to lend their "authenticity" seal of approval. Peyton and the original Chad Powers Eli Manning are producers, making sure Glen Powell "looks like a D1 quarterback." I’m sure they were very "hands-on," cashing the checks and nodding along as their one-off gag was repurposed into a redemption arc for a fictional character nobody asked for. This ain't some scrappy indie project. This is a calculated brand extension.

The Depressing Math of a "Guaranteed" Hit

Checking the Boxes

The whole thing feels like it was assembled from a checklist of "How to Make a Streaming Hit in the 2020s."

You got your big star, Glen Powell, who is perfectly charming and talented and completely wasted here. You got your high-concept hook based on pre-existing IP. You got your "edgy" R-rating so you can have some locker room talk and prove this isn't for kids. And, in the most depressingly predictable move of all, you get a cameo from "Hawk Tuah Girl."

Seriously? It’s the modern content playbook. Find a meme that’s currently burning bright, shove it into your product before it goes stale, and hope the algorithm picks it up. It has nothing to do with storytelling. It has everything to do with desperate, sweaty-palmed relevance-chasing. It reminds me of when my ISP throttles my connection and then tries to sell me a "speed boost" package. You're creating the problem and then selling me the solution.

The story follows Russ trying out for the South Georgia Catfish, a fictional team that plays against real schools like Ole Miss and Tennessee. He befriends the team mascot, Danny, because an underdog needs a sidekick. He’s running from his past. He’s looking for a second chance. We’ve seen this story a thousand times, and the only new wrinkle here is that the main character is wearing a Spirit Halloween costume. The anticipation is "palpable," they say, with talk of Season 2 already in the air, and I just...

Then again, maybe I'm the idiot. Maybe this is what people want. A familiar joke, a handsome movie star, and some meme-of-the-month cameos. Maybe the world is tired of originality and just wants to be fed a lukewarm slurry of things it already recognizes. The Chad Powers show is probably going to be a massive hit, and I'm just some guy yelling at my screen about the death of creativity.

But I have to ask: are we really supposed to be invested in the emotional journey of a guy whose entire plan is "what if I did a bad Sacha Baron Cohen impression at a football tryout?"

Okay, The Joke's Over Now

At the end of the day, Chad Powers isn't a show about second chances. It's a show about how corporate media can't leave a single good, simple thing alone. It's a monument to the idea that if something is funny for five minutes, it must be even funnier stretched out over five hours with an R-rating. It won't be.

Reference article source：

• 'Chad Powers' creators wanted authenticity. So they enlisted 'Hawk Tuah Girl' and the Mannings - Los Angeles Times