[COLUMN] Chad Powers Offers a Cruel Twist on the Classic Redemption Fantasy | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the final ten minutes of the first season of Chad Powers, which is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. The six episode season is a bit tonally all over the place, struggling to find a balance between broad sitcom plotting and more interesting character work, but it does have a pretty great ending. If you want to check out the season, feel free to bookmark and come back. If not, Powers ahead.

For most of its first season, Chad Powers seems like a fairly predictable and conventional feel-good sports comedy.

Developed from a character created by Eli Manning for his college football series Eli’s Places, the show follows disgraced professional footballer Russ Holliday (Glen Powell) as he uses make-up stolen from his father Mike (Toby Huss) to reinvent himself as college athlete Chad Powers, earning a place on the South Georgia catfish under the supervision of coach Jake Hudson (Steve Zahn) and his daughter Ricky (Perry Mattfield).

The six-episode season has a fairly conventional structure that is built around audience expectations of how a story like this is supposed to work. It is a familiar tale of a washed-up celebrity who travels to another part of America and through communion with a different style of living reconnects with himself. It is the tale of a bad person who learns to be a good person through the process of pretending. Russ is cynical, bitter and cruel. Chad is sweet, naïve and innocent.

The sitcom hits many of the high-concept beats that one might expect from a series like this, often by playing into the inherent absurdity of the lengths that Russ has to go to so that he can maintain the illusion of Chad. The second episode, for example, finds Russ attending a pool party and trying to avoid ruining his prosthetics. The fourth episode follows Russ on a late-night adventure desperately trying to repair and recover his make-up before “room check” the night before a big game.

Chad Powers is big and broad. It is also frequently saccharine. Ricky finds herself striking up an unlikely friendship with “Chad”, and Russ finds himself falling for Ricky. This inevitably creates dramatic stakes within the show, as Russ finds himself lying to Ricky in order to preserve the idea of Chad. When Ricky muses that the team and fans love Chad, Chad earnestly replies, “Maybe I’m not as good as they think I am… Maybe I’m not as good as you think I am.”

The expectation in a show like Chad Powers is that Russ will be humbled by his experience of life without the burdens of celebrity, that this disguise will provide a path to redemption. Russ can shed his baggage and his shame, be born again as somebody new and pure. There are certainly points when the series leans heavily into this, as the characters around Chad come to treat him as a figure similar to Forrest (Tom Hanks) from Forrest Gump, a “sweet, possibly inbred folk hero.”

Inevitably, the season builds towards the collapse of the lie. The penultimate episode finds Russ screwing up royally. Out of make-up, as himself, he meets a woman named Wendy (Megan Ketch) at a bar and they have a tryst in Russ’ CyberTruck. The following day, as Chad, Russ discovers that Wendy is actually Jake’s wife and Ricky’s mother. Wendy confesses her affair at lunch, which causes Jake to have a heart attack, forcing Russ-as-Chad to drive Jake and Ricky to hospital in his cybertruck.

This is enough for Ricky to piece together that Chad is Russ, blowing his secret wide open the night before another big game. Russ spirals, his dreams of redemption collapsing into dust. He retreats to his father, confessing everything. “People actually like Chad,” Russ admits. “Chad actually liked people.” As one expects of a wizened old father figure in the final stretch of a story like this, Mike reveals that he is actually proud of Russ for making something of himself, and urges Russ to return to Georgia, confess his scheme and hope that Ricky accepts him.

As Chad, Russ confronts Ricky in the team bus. It is a scene that could have been lifted from any number of generic romantic comedies. Russ lays everything out for her. He apologises profusely. He makes the case that Chad has perhaps allowed him to be a better person. It feels like a moment that is building to reconciliation, to the possibility that Ricky will understand Russ and forgive him, absolving him of every bad choice he has ever made. She asks if she can touch his face.

And then she slaps him. Quite justifiably, Ricky points out the insanity of what Russ has done and the absurdity of expecting her forgiveness for both the damage he has caused and the betrayal that disguised it. Not unreasonably, Ricky calls Russ a “lying psychopath” and “a pathetic, disgusting, iconic loser.” She warns him, mere minutes before kick-off, “If you don’t stay away from this team, I will tell the whole world. I will burn you to pieces.”

This is a sharp swerve, but Chad Powers is still in conventional redemption story territory. The idea of Russ having to redeem himself for Ricky is a solid hook for a second season, a clear escalation of the show’s stakes and premise. Russ can still make it right at this point. However, the show pivots hard again. Russ takes a moment, and then lays out his counter-argument. “I don’t think you’ll tell everyone about me,” he warns Ricky. “You won’t just burn me. You’ll burn everything. Including your dad.”

The final ten minutes of the season find Russ blackmailing his way back on to the team, and making Ricky complicit in his fraud by threatening to destroy her father’s reputation. It’s a bold choice. Obviously, the show will have to navigate the fallout from that storytelling beat, but it’s a narrative decision that puts the previous five episodes in sharp relief. Russ’ redemption is not – and never was – going to be as simply as burying himself under pounds of prosthetics. Russ is still a bad guy.

Although Chad Powers invites obvious comparisons to Ted Lasso, it feels more like a companion piece to James Gunn’s Peacemaker. Like Russ, Christopher Smith (John Cena) is a strikingly handsome white man in peak physical condition. Both struggle with the idea of redemption for their past sins, trying to figure out what it might look like. Russ creates Chad Powers as a vehicle for the absolution of his sins, while Chris tries to escape into an alternate universe where his failures never happened.

“I’ve tried again and again to make up for my mistakes,” Chris writes to his friends in the fifth episode of the second season of Peacemaker, as he prepares to abandon them for his alternate life. “But I’m not sure redemption is something that’s truly possible – at least not here. So I’m going to make a life in the other world. I’m going to be a brother to my brother, a son to my dad.” Like Russ, Chris believes that he can simply start over again. He can be born again, fresh and renewed.

It makes sense that contemporary media would be engaged with this question. The debate around “cancel culture” rages on, the question of how society should deal with people who have done bad things and how those people can recover their reputations and standings. After all, this autumn saw the premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, which is grappling with similar questions. What happens in the aftermath of a cancellation?

It is an interesting question to ask, particularly now, as various “cancelled” figures have begun to work their way back into public life. Some employ the same methods as Christopher Smith, choosing to live in (or construct) alternate realities where they are embraced uncritically – often by pivoting to the other side of the political aisle. Others follow the path walked by Russ, creating bizarre alternate personas or working quietly in far away places.

This question has a personal dimension for Gunn, who is one of the rare cancelled artists to navigate a triumphant and widely-embraced return from public disgrace. In 2018, Gunn was fired from his work at Disney when old social media posts resurfaced. Rather than offering a disingenuous apology or downplaying the seriousness of the posts, Gunn instead went away. He returned to public life a few years later, talking about what he learned from the experience.

Gunn is proof that redemption is possible for a disgraced public figure, but it’s not necessarily easy. Chad Powers and Peacemaker are both about characters who feel that they are owed a redemptive arc, hoping that there is some shortcut that they might take to get back to fame and fortune. This is, after all, a longstanding cornerstone of these sorts of stories: nothing is unforgivable. There is always a way back, and the more absurd the path the more complete the forgiveness.

After all, all that Darth Vader (James Earl Jones, David Prowse) had to do to be redeemed in Return of the Jedi was to throw an old age pensioner (Ian McDiarmid) down a gigantic shaft. Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) might have tortured an entire town in WandaVision, but it’s okay because Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) assures the audience that “they'll never know what you sacrificed for them.” Hell, Russ gets his inspiration for Chad from a giant poster for Mrs. Doubtfire.

In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that this emphasis on redemption narratives betrays a sense of privilege, prioritizing the feelings of the perpetrators over the victims. One of the darker recurring jokes in Chad Powers is how Russ consistently blames his misfortune on the sick kid (Henry Heffernan) that he hurt, treating the death of that child eight years after the fact, which brings all the news coverage of that humiliation back into circulation, as a tragedy that personally undermines him.

One of the big questions lingering around this sort of redemption story is who gets the luxury of being redeemed, whose feelings are allowed to matter. Russ is insanely privileged. He’s a rich white handsome former footballer. Even after his disgrace, he seems to live a relatively charmed life, hanging out with Haliey Welch (herself) in cool Los Angeles nightspots. It’s pathetic, but Russ clearly doesn’t have as much at stake as Jake and Ricky, whose livelihoods he puts in jeopardy.

Both Chad Powers and the second season of Peacemaker explore the easy appeal of the classic redemption narrative – the belief that a person can be redeemed through transformation, whether simply going somewhere else like Chris does or pretending to be somebody else like Russ does. In both cases, this is not enough. No matter where they go or who they pretend to be, both Russ and Chris remain themselves. Until they can work on themselves, neither will find the peace they crave.

Chad Powers is uneven. It struggles a little bit in balancing its tone, shifting sharply between saccharine sitcom sweetness and something much more acidic simmering just beneath the surface. However, the show’s finale adds an interesting and surprising layer of complexity to what seems like a fairly straightforward premise. Chad is not enough to save Russ. Russ is still the same flawed person that he always was, poisoning the things that he loves.

Maybe Russ just needs to take the mask off and look at himself.