When Michael Waldron graduated from the University of Georgia in 2011, he did what so many aspiring creatives do: packed up and moved to Hollywood. What he didn’t realize was that Hollywood was already heading his direction.
Waldron has worked on many of the big-budget projects that have made Atlanta such a hotbed for film and TV production over the last decade, including the Marvel television series Loki and the pro-wrestling series Heels on Starz. But none have felt quite as quintessentially Georgia — specifically, Georgia football — as Chad Powers, the Hulu comedy series Waldron co-created with the show’s star, Glen Powell.
Waldron and Powell first bonded years ago, naturally, over their love of college football — Powell is an avowed Texas Longhorns fan. But Chad Powers is much more than just a TV show version of College GameDay and sports highlights. Powell stars in a dual role, of sorts: He’s Russ Holliday, the disgraced former college athlete, and Chad Powers, the alter ego Russ adopts in order to walk on to the struggling South Georgia Catfish college football team and get his own shot at redemption.
It’s a farcical premise that is well aware of the familiar ground on which it treads — Russ literally gets the idea from looking at a poster of Mrs. Doubtfire. But just like its inspirations, Chad Powers is far more than its high-concept premise.
“I was always most interested in where the show gets by the end,” says Waldron, who got his start working alongside Dan Harmon on the genre-bending comedies Rick and Morty and Community. “Mrs. Doubtfire goes to a dramatic place, and Tootsie does too — it somewhat seriously interrogates the fallout of people realizing they’ve been duped in this way. It felt like a lot of the season was the setup for that.”
By the end of Chad Powers’ first, six-episode season, Russ’ deception has been uncovered by the team’s assistant coach, Ricky (Perry Mattfeld), a woman constantly trying to prove herself in the team’s male-dominated front office. The growing, possibly flirtatious relationship between Ricky and Russ — but also Chad! — is a major thread of the season. Building to this point, Waldron says, “I was excited to do what felt like the R-rated version of what Sally Field said to Robin Williams in that restaurant.”
It took all season to build to the emotional climax of that scene between Russ and Ricky, with Waldron asking the writers — all of whom came to the Atlanta set during production — to “write this show like it’s Succession.” He continues, “It’s a crazy premise, and I think the only way Glen and I could actually take it seriously was to really take it seriously. I’m always going to try and find the heart and the dramatic stakes in the thing.”
Now that they’ve gotten to this point, Waldron says that season two of Chad Powers, which wrapped production earlier this year, will feel like a noticeably different show.
“I think that it’s fun in all the same ways, but I think like any good show, it’s an escalation,” he tells me. “It’s a new story. Ricky knows, and now the show is fundamentally turned on its head in a really fun way. Whether she likes it or not, she is part of this lie.”
Comedy Beyond the Balls
Like anyone else making a show on modern television, Waldron knows what he’s up against. “I want people to put their phones down and lean forward and turn the sound up and turn the lights off,” he tells me. Fortunately, Waldron has a secret weapon for that with Chad Powers.
“There’s a thriller engine to the show that I hope keeps audiences wanting to know what happens next, and there’s a love story at the center of it. We’re not doing anything radical here,” he says. “Ultimately if somebody asks me what the show is, I’m like, ‘It’s a thriller about a guy trying to hold up this lie’ — that’s the Breaking Bad side of it. And then it is a will-they, won’t-they —it’s Sam and Diane, it’s Jim and Pam.”
There’s significantly less suspense on Chad Powers, oddly enough, around the actual game of football being played by the South Georgia Catfish — we don’t even see the outcome of their big showdown in the finale against Waldron’s beloved Georgia Bulldogs. But that’s become a bit of a tradition among all the sports-centric shows populating television right now, all arriving in the wake of Ted Lasso and finding ways to mine drama from the world of sports that has nothing to do with the outcome on the field, rink or court.
The most famous current example — and famously ineligible for the Emmys — is, of course, Heated Rivalry, which centers on two professional hockey players but is much more concerned with their romance than with anything that happens on the ice. Creator Jacob Tierney has promised more hockey in the second season, and the source material in Rachel Reid’s book could definitely lend itself to a queer Ted Lasso kind of show about a found-family team. But it’s still hard to imagine anyone watching Heated Rivalry for the hockey.
Same goes for Prime Video’s Off Campus, another adaptation of a wildly popular book series about hockey players that has become a springtime hit. Described as “possibly even less interested in the sport of hockey than Heated Rivalry,” Off Campus is poised to become a Bridgerton-style anthology, with the first season tracking the unlikely romance between bookish Hannah (Ella Bright) and sensitive jock Garrett (Belmont Cameli). As in Chad Powers and Heated Rivalry, the love story is the point — and the point of all those viral TikTok supercuts, too.
The sport of basketball is significantly more central in Running Point, which returned to Netflix this spring with star Kate Hudson fresh off an Oscar nomination. This season, like the first one, is all building to the team’s championship run, and there’s plenty of on-court drama getting there — including significant injuries and a requisite courtside pep talk from Hudson’s team owner, Isla. But there’s also a love triangle, an embezzling scheme and unending family drama — which, come to think of it, probably describes a lot of real-world sports teams, too.
Sometimes the best way to build a character around the world of sports is to have them be out of the game entirely. On Apple TV’s Stick, Owen Wilson plays a washed-up golfer seeking redemption — yes, another one! — by coaching a talented young upstart played by Peter Dager. And on The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, Tracy Morgan’s titular ex-football player isn’t trying to get back into the sport, but is working to secure his place in the Hall of Fame as the season concludes. Now that Reggie Dinkins — hallelujah! — has a second season coming, we can find out if Reggie ever gets there. But presumably the show will remain much more invested in silly things like Daniel Radcliffe pretending to do parkour, thank goodness.
