“Logo text The Chad Powers season one finale will sneak up on you. The Glen Powell sitcom, an adaptation of a viral Eli Manning short, is just six episodes long. It ends pretty suddenly, midway through the titular character’s first season with the fictitious South Georgia Catfish just as they are about to take on”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
The Chad Powers season one finale will sneak up on you.
The Glen Powell sitcom, an adaptation of a viral Eli Manning short, is just six episodes long. It ends pretty suddenly, midway through the titular character’s first season with the fictitious South Georgia Catfish just as they are about to take on the very real — and very scary — Georgia Bulldogs.
Hulu chief Craig Erwich told me the small-batch order was because of Powell’s busy schedule, which is understandable — just look at the man’s IMDb. Understandable but perhaps not entirely true, series co-creator and showrunner (and huge Bulldogs fan) Michael Waldron (Loki, Heels) tells The Hollywood Reporter.
He elaborates on that in our conversation below, while also teasing his plans for a potential Chad Powers season two and even three. We even stumbled upon the man’s exit strategy — if he needs to use it.
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Craig Erwich said season one was only six episodes because Glen Powell has such a busy schedule. Would you have liked to do more episodes for the first season?
This is the real answer: It stopped where I would have wanted to stop it. As much as I love these characters, you can’t do 150 episodes of this premise. Powers will run out of eligibility. So the idea was always to go to about the midpoint of the football season. And yes, Glen’s a busy guy, but six episodes felt right to me. Loki was six episodes. That was technically an hour long, but[[Chad Powers]episodes are longer [than the typical 22-minutes for a sitcom].
Doing six episodes felt like an event, which I liked. When you’ve got Glen Powell on television, it makes you accelerate your storytelling in a way that, again and again, I’ve found is a good thing. You never tread water. So in the case of the first season, we’re gonna pull up Ricky (Perry Mattfeld) finding out (that Chad is Russ Holliday) earlier than the audience might expect. And then we can get the audience in this place of free fall where they don’t know what’s coming next.
Now that you say that, I did have that feeling!
When we started writing the season, we’d always circle, “Alright, that’s probably a nice, tidy season cliffhanger of Ricky finding out.” Then as we got closer and closer, I kept thinking, “Why on Earth would I save [that]. Fire all your bullets, right? Write yourself into the corner now.” And I’m glad we did.
Plus if you get cancelled, you don’t have to decide if your Bulldogs lose (to the Catfish).
That is a handy thing. That will be a silver lining if we’re canceled — I don’t draw [Georgia football coach] Kirby [Smart’s] ire.
Chad Powers showrunner Michael Waldron. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Do you have a (potential) second season mapped out at this point?
We’ve certainly talked about it — talked about a plan. [Hulu] has a sense of where we’d like to take it. Ultimately, we have to see how the show performs, but everybody knows Glen and I want to see this thing through to the end. There’s a lot more story left to tell, so I hope we get to do it. When you get to the end of the first season, it feels like we’re just getting started. Ricky is now pulled into this alliance and now we can get into ours Empire Strikes Back chapter of this trilogy. I hope we get to keep it going.
You said earlier that Chad Powers can’t go 150 episodes — how long can it go?
Like 135-140.[[Laughs.]The plan that we’ve always had in our minds is, “Let’s run this thing through one football season.” How long is that? It’s at least three seasons of TV. So that’s what I have in my head. I want to see if he can take the Catfish all the way.
Breaking Bad was a huge reference for this show — not everybody’s gonna get out alive here. If we were to make another season, it would certainly be about the forces of evil as they might be closing in on our heroes. The more success Chad has, the more threats Russ faces.
Does that mean we won’t see Chad’s sophomore year?
We haven’t even defined what year he is, technically, eligibility-wise. It’s hard to project beyond one season. We have to see where the story takes us. We’re always trying to write ourselves in the corners, accelerate that timeline. Could you buy him getting away with it for one season, then doing it again? I don’t know.
I see what you’re getting at there, and I’ll be the one who says it: If Russ gets caught as Chad, any remaining eligibility for Russ could potentially be a loophole to save an otherwise-forfeited season. Have you defined how many years Russ Holliday played college ball?
We didn’t define it. What we circled in the writers room is that he was probably a junior. So technically, there’s a year of eligibility left out there.
That’s a very good out, if you have to use it.
If we have to use it.
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Chad Powers is now streaming all of season one on Hulu. Read THR‘s cover story with Glen Powell and Eli Manning.