Ted Lasso on acid: This is one of the strangest shows of 2025

4 days ago 5

Chad Powers ★★★

If you told me the first few episodes of this new Glen Powell sports comedy were entirely AI-generated, I would believe you.

The plot is a direct rip from a viral prank played by real-life quarterback Eli Manning for a 2022 ESPN series. It has the classic prosthetic-fuelled high jinks of Mrs Doubtfire and the dweeby feelgoodery of Ted Lasso (also based on a viral sketch character), and they’ve all been left to rot in a thick soup of other pop culture. There’s a cameo from the “Hawk Tuah girl” within the first five minutes.

Glen Powell (under a lot of prosthetics) in Chad Powers.

Two episodes in (which is what Disney+ dropped for the show’s premiere this week), I was convinced it was one of the worst shows of 2025. A glittering monument to the death of original thought. And that’s without getting into the fact that Glen Powell, one of Hollywood’s brightest shining stars thanks to blockbuster turns in Top Gun: Maverick, Anyone But You and Twisters, is running around doing his most demented Joe Dirt.

So why, after having watched the whole season, did I find myself rooting for it? The final three instalments of this six-episode season completely took me by surprise, finding glimpses of actual greatness and at times leaning so hard into the absurdity of its own creation that I simply have to respect it – or at least respect Powell’s commitment to the bit. This show is Ted Lasso on acid.

Created by Powell and Michael Waldron (a writer and producer of Rick and Morty who went on to make Loki), Chad Powers tells the story of Russ Holliday (Powell), a disgraced college quarterback looking for another shot at glory eight years after the very public collapse of his career. Inspired by his Academy Award-winning father’s movie prosthetics (Toby Huss) and, yes, a literal poster for Mrs Doubtfire, Russ decides to enter open tryouts for a Georgia university team called the Catfish (get it?) under a new identity. And thus Chad Powers is born.

Chad is the antithesis of Russ: an awkward, kind and humble Southerner (Chad “grew up off the grid where the crawdads are,” Russ says, thinking on his feet). And the transformation provokes a full existential crisis in this “f---boy” who drives a Cybertruck and has “buddies in crypto and NFT”, desperate to escape himself. (In a particularly surreal moment, Powell, as Chad, delivers the funniest line reading of “I’m gonna kill myself” ever put to screen).

It also poses complications for his developing relationship with the harried and hardworking head coach (the always great Steve Zahn) and his daughter/assistant coach Ricky (Perry Mattfeld). As we get to the later episodes, these conflicts occasionally drive the show into all-out drama – with some choices therein that are genuinely both surprising and affecting.

The show is set up to fail on so many fronts. There will be viewers who find it all too derivative from the start (the original sketch featured Manning going undercover with the same costume and alias), and there will be others who simply aren’t interested in the character. Despite Herculean effort from Powell, Russ Holliday isn’t Robin Williams’ Daniel Hillard, a devoted father of two disguising himself in a desperate bid to stay with his kids; he’s a young jerk with frosted tips who wants to play football again. Why should we tune in – weekly, no less – for this guy’s journey of self-discovery?

Speaking with GQ ahead of the series’ launch, Waldron was well aware of the challenge ahead. “I think that [most people will think] this is probably going to be a piece of shit,” he said. “But to me, that was kind of one of the advantages of the show. How on earth could they make something compelling out of this?”

In that same interview, Powell cited their inspirations as Armageddon, Nancy Meyers (the filmmaker behind Something’s Gotta Give and The Holiday) and the Safdie brothers’ A24 thriller Good Time. Weirdly, I can see it all. And while that doesn’t make for a series that’s tonally cohesive or even consistently enjoyable, it does make it interesting – and that’s more than I can say for Ted Lasso these days.