“I think we were the only people who raised our hands for it,” says Chad Powers executive producer Michael Waldron about the prospect of adapting a sketch from Eli Manning‘s production company into a TV show. But he, along with Glen Powell, decided to challenge themselves to turn what he calls the “stupidest idea ever” into something worth watching. Chad Powers, the six-episode comedy series which debuted on Hulu in September, follows Russ Holliday, a disgraced college football player (played by Powell), who decides to disguise himself with prosthetics to try for a comeback at a small struggling college team.
Waldron talked to Gold Derby— as part of our “Meet the Experts: Spotlight” series with TV showrunners — about expanding the world beyond Russ’s character and grounding it in reality.
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Gold Derby: Could Russ have been played by anyone other than Glen Powell?
Michael Waldron: It was either gonna be Glen or me. It was between us and he has more followers, so it had to be him. [Laughs.] He’s so, so funny and such a talented actor and also a great athlete. He’s just the full package. Everything that makes him this great leading man and an action star and everything that you’re seeing him do now in movies, I think is exactly what made it so exciting to have him play this insane, ridiculous part on TV.
How did this idea come together for the two of you?
Glen and I have been buddies for a while and we wanted to work together and we’re both big college football fans. So when it came about that Omaha, Peyton Manning and Eli Manning’s company, wanted to adapt this sketch into a show, I think we were the only people who raised our hands for it. It’s a very dumb idea for a show, I think we were excited by the challenge of, can we take the stupidest idea for a show ever and actually really take it seriously and try and make something human and grounded and emotional and hopefully surprising and funny and actually good. Actually good was like our North Star.
How did you approach it?
I mean, it’s the conceit of a guy wearing a prosthetic playing football — it’s absurd. We knew the audience was gonna come in with sort of a large amount of [skepticism] that requires a lot of buy-in. And So we said, let’s try and ground everything else about the show in reality, and that extended everything how we wrote it, how we wrote the other characters, how we cast the show around Glen. We tried to find great dramatic actors and trust them to be hilarious which they were. We said let’s just take it seriously because that was actually what felt kind of subversive.
What were some of the shows you looked at for inspiration?
I think obviously, Eastbound and Down, certainly an inspiration for something like this. Eastbound‘s a show that I love. It’s a sports show that doesn’t really pull any punches. In our writers room, we talk about Breaking Bad a lot because it’s a show with a big lie at the center of it. And the conceit of the show is how long can our hero keep these plates spinning? And if the lie is discovered, what’s the fallout going to be? How many people are gonna be hurt as a result of it? So we talked about Breaking Bad, we talked about, can we write ourselves into corners like that? And trusted ourselves that the show would bend towards something funny because we had a bunch of really funny writers and funny actors.
How long can you keep that lie going?
Twenty seasons. This is gonna be like The Simpsons. This could go forever. I’m prepared to do this for the rest of my life. [Laughs.] I think our plan is three seasons. We’d love to do three seasons of this thing. It seems like audiences really responding to it, which is fun. So we’re excited to keep it going.
This article and video are presented by Hulu.
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