Hulu did not ease anybody into this one. All six episodes of “Chad Powers” Season 2 hit at 3 a.m. Eastern on Thursday morning, the whole thing at once, no weekly rollout and no room to breathe between hits. Season 1 was a wig and latex farce about a washed-up quarterback conning his way onto a college roster on the strength of a fake face and a worse accent. Season 2 is a story about a man watching his own lie tighten around his throat, and it is tense in a way absolutely nobody ordered.
That tonal swing is the entire story of these six episodes, and whether you come out of them thrilled or irritated depends almost completely on how you feel about it. The Catfish are chasing a playoff berth, Russ Holliday (Glen Powell) is still buried under the prosthetics, and the circle of people who know his secret keeps widening until it finally caves in on him. There are still laughs here, but they are load bearing now instead of decorative, and the show knows exactly what it is doing with them. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Chad Powers” Season 2, including the Texas game, Gerry’s blackmail scheme and the final scene of the season.
Season 2 is a story about a man watching his own lie tighten around his throat, and it is tense in a way absolutely nobody ordered.”
The season picks up about a week after Season 1 signed off, and it wastes no time cashing in the one thing that changed everything. Ricky Hudson (Perry Mattfeld) knows. She knows Chad Powers is Russ Holliday, she knows Danny (Frankie A. Rodriguez) has been the one gluing him into that face every game day, and the premiere, titled “7th Quarter,” drops that fragile new alliance straight into a vice when Chad goes down with a mid-game injury. What follows is the funniest sustained stretch of the season, a piece of physical comedy built around Chad trying to get himself out of an X-ray before a technician sees what is underneath.
Handing Ricky the secret is the smartest decision this show has ever made, because it promotes her out of the love interest slot and into the co-lead role. Mattfeld spends six episodes juggling four incompatible things at once: fury at having been dragged into a felony, loyalty to her father, her own stalled coaching ambitions, and real feelings for a man whose actual face she has barely seen. She flips between wanting to strangle him and wanting to protect him, sometimes inside a single scene, and it never once reads as the writers having it both ways. It is the performance of the season and it is not particularly close.
Her father is the other pressure point, and the show is patient with him. Jake Hudson (Steve Zahn) spends the early stretch circling something he cannot name, and “8th Quarter” tightens it considerably when the team’s bye week house party gives him a long, unguarded look at his miracle quarterback. Zahn plays him as a man who is too decent to want to be right, which makes every near miss land harder than it has any business landing. That is the trick this season keeps pulling: the closer anybody gets to the truth, the worse you feel for every single person in the room.
And then there is Gerry Dougan (Colton Ryan), who is the reason this stops being a comedy at all. The backup quarterback spent Season 1 as a punchline, an entitled kid sulking about where he sat on the depth chart. Here he curdles into a genuine problem, someone who decides that exposing Chad is worth whatever it costs him personally, and Ryan plays the escalation beautifully, turning the humor down one click per episode until there is nothing funny left in him. Villains on shows like this usually stay ridiculous on purpose. Gerry does not, and the season is much better and much bleaker for it.
“11th Quarter” is where the show abandons its original genre outright. The penultimate episode plays as a home invasion thriller rather than a sports comedy: Gerry breaks into the house Russ and Danny share, attacks Danny, and walks back out with the prosthetics. There is no joke undercutting it, no warm resolution waiting on the far side, and the whole sequence is genuinely upsetting in a way “Chad Powers” has never once tried to be. If you came to this show for wig gags and locker room bits, this is the episode that tells you whether you are staying for a third season.
The terms Gerry sets are nastier than simple exposure, and they are what makes the finale work as well as it does. He does not want Chad benched or arrested. He wants him to play a historically bad game against Texas so that a two hundred thousand dollar bet cashes, and he wants Russ to take the fall for a 3D-printed gun found in Gerry’s locker. It is blackmail engineered so that the truth coming out would destroy Russ twice over, on the field and in a courtroom. Russ agrees, because by that point there is genuinely nothing else on the table.
What rescues the finale from being a straight capitulation is Ricky, and the way “12th Quarter” pays off something the season planted six episodes earlier. She finds the statistics sheet Russ has been using to script his own sabotage, works out precisely what he has agreed to do, and instead of turning him in she goes digging through the game tape from his Oregon days. She had already accepted a coaching job at Syracuse. She could have walked away clean and let the whole thing burn down behind her. Instead she builds a set of trick plays out of a version of Russ Holliday that stopped existing years ago.
The Texas game itself is the best sustained sequence this series has produced. Chad runs the sabotage for as long as he can physically stand to, Ricky’s plays claw the Catfish back into contention, and then Russ makes the choice the entire season has been driving toward and breaks Gerry’s terms outright, running the ball in himself for the win. Gerry storms the field in a rage and gets flattened by Tricia Yeager’s (Wynn Everett) security guard, which is when the season quietly drops its biggest reveal: Tricia has known who Chad really is this whole time, and she has her own reasons for keeping him buried under that face.
Then the locker room, and the ending everybody is going to be arguing about all weekend. Russ finally says it out loud to Ricky, she kisses him, and somewhere in the middle of it she starts peeling what is left of the prosthetic off his face. That is the exact moment Jake Hudson comes through the door. Russ turns away, the episode cuts hard to black, and the season ends without ever telling you whether the man who has spent a year chasing this thing finally caught it.
It is a cheap trick and it absolutely works, which is more or less the story of the whole season. Three threads are left dangling: whether Jake registered what he saw, whether Ricky actually leaves for Syracuse, and whether Gerry is finished or merely unconscious. That is a lot of weight to hang on a season that does not exist yet, and it is the one place where the six-episode order really bites. The reviews that liked this season most made the same complaint.
The critics have split on this, and for once the split is interesting instead of noise. Some of the warmest reviews of the year landed on this season, calling it a leap forward and comfortably the best work the show has done. Collider’s Carly Lane went the other way with a 6 out of 10, arguing the pivot into thriller territory is an evolution in the wrong direction and that six episodes is not enough runway for material this dark, and there is a real case buried in that. Season 1 balanced the dread with relief. Season 2 mostly just applies pressure and waits. When we covered the Season 1 premiere getting sacked by negative reviews, the open question was whether the series could still score. It can. It just decided to stop being the show that was asking.
What Do You Think? Did Jake Hudson actually see Russ under that prosthetic, or is the show going to walk it back and buy itself another full season of the lie? Is Tricia Yeager’s silence genuine protection, or leverage she fully intends to cash in the second it suits her? And was trading the comedy for a thriller the right call, or did “Chad Powers” give away the exact thing that made it worth watching in the first place?
See you on the next binge!
