Chad Powers

The search for the new Ted Lasso goes on with Chad Powers, a blunt new comedy starring Hollywood’s man of the moment Glen Powell as Russ Holliday, a spectacularly disgraced American football player who is still in social exile eight years after a massive scandal tanked his sporting career.

Holliday is arrogant, bitter and in denial about the loss of his glory years, but even his current status as a “tabloid jackass”, up to his neck in crypto, cocaine and hangers-on, proves to be a fragile state of affairs, and soon he finds that he has been cancelled once again.

No team in America, of any level, is willing to take on this toxic player, despite the fact that he might have been the best of his generation.

But what if Russ Holliday could become a new man entirely? A struggling college team in Georgia puts out an open call for a quarterback, and handily for the plot, Holliday’s father does prosthetics for the movie industry.

On a film set, Holliday spots a billboard for Mrs Doubtfire, in which Robin Williams transformed himself into his own children’s nanny. Idea firmly planted, Holliday drives across the country in his Tesla Cybertruck, packed with his father’s tools of the trade — a fake nose, big teeth, a shaggy wig and plenty of cosmetic glue — and a supposedly youngish player called Chad Powers is born.

Powell is a co-writer on the show, along with Michael Waldron, who also has a small role. Powell is a likeable enough leading man, even when his characters are defiantly dislikeable, but he does not give himself very much to work with here.

Most of the early drama centres on how Holliday can maintain his stick-on disguise. He runs out of glue. He has to avoid showers and swimming pools. It wears thin, and quickly. The flimsiness of the ruse means that the show itself often seems insubstantial. And yet the catalyst for Holliday’s reinvention is the death of a teenager from cancer, which is a rough jumping-off point for any comedy, even for a story about a weak man learning to be a better one. When it does attempt to be sincere, as it must, it is jarring.

Comparisons with Apple TV+’s feel-good sporting dramedy Ted Lasso are inevitable. Both are extended versions of what was originally a short sketch. Both lean heavily on the fish-out-of-water trope, and both insist that sport can unite us, despite culture clashes and our own human flaws.

But in the end, the differences between the shows are stark, and not flattering for the newcomer. If Ted Lasso built its reputation on a kind of gee-whizz homeliness, then Chad Powers opts for the polar opposite. The humour is coarse and mean-spirited.

But even so, as Holliday's new personality sees him shedding his arrogance and becoming a more reflective man, there's fun to be had with this goofball identity crisis.