Glen Powell's Chad Powers is here and we don't care for it one bit

Six months ago, we heard some TV news that we were extremely comfortable labeling, at the time, as one of the single worst ideas we’d ever heard: Glen Powell, ascendant heartthrob, had signed on to star in Chad Powers, a TV show based on this one time that NFL star Eli Manning put on a ton of prosthetics, adopted a terrible Matthew McConaughey accent, and baffled some poor college football hopefuls with some of the worst improv comedy ever perpetrated by man. At the time, we reflected to ourselves that expanding “Chad Powers”—who appeared in a single episode of Manning’s ESPN+ streaming show, and in our nightmares about two nights out of every week since—out into a full TV show was not just a waste of Powell’s talents, but also every single other human being bending their efforts to putting such a show into production at Hulu’s behest.

But sadly, unlike Andy Richter, we do not control the universe. And so Chad Powers is here now, in all his “Well, Ted Lasso started out as sports-based sketch comedy, and that made a lot of money” glory, in the form of a first look photo of Powell in the makeup. He does, admittedly, look better than Manning did, for a variety of factors that presumably include age, budget, and the, uh, basic foundation that the prosthetic artists were given to work with. But the premise of the show remains “Roll your eyes so hard they break orbit and escape your face” ridiculous, with the 35-year-0ld Powell (who also co-wrote the show’s pilot) playing a college quarterback who gets kicked out of football for being a jerk, and so reinvents himself as a walk-on prospect who you just know is going to distribute some folksy wisdom to his teammates, while also learning a little about himself in the process.

Glen Powell knows he’s a movie star now, right? Somebody should maybe check.