Eli Manning and Michael Waldron on Chad Powers season 2, Glenn Powell's range, and a 20-season plan

Chad Powers started as a two-hour prosthetics stunt at a Penn State open tryout. Eli Manning, worried about pulling a hamstring during the 40-yard dash, improvised increasingly outrageous lies and just kept running with them. That instinct — say something absurd, don't over-explain, get out fast — turned out to be the show's creative DNA.

Michael Waldron and Glenn Powell had been looking for a project together when the sketch came their way. Their first reaction was that adapting it was an insane idea. Then Powell suggested the Mrs. Doubtfire angle: what if a character actually put on prosthetics and tried to do this for real? The premise worked because, as Waldron puts it, in the world of college football it's weirdly believable. Someone actually might do that.

“This thing, if any idea has legs, it's Chad Powers. We're gonna chase down the Simpsons. Glenn, clearly, a movie star — one half of this handsome leading man, and then the other half is this Jim Carrey-esque idiot performance. It's a really brave performance. Not every leading man is able to play an idiot and really humble themselves.”

Season two and the long game

Waldron's stated plan is 20 seasons. He's half-joking, but the underlying logic isn't: Chad Powers is one of the few IP concepts flexible enough to sustain indefinite reinvention, in the same way The Simpsons has. Season two deliberately pushed the show toward thriller and drama, leaning harder into genre than audiences expected. The early response suggests it connected.

Manning feeds the writers with real locker room stories, letting Waldron disguise the sourcing enough that the teammate who inspired a scene might only recognise himself. That arrangement gives the show a level of specificity that pure invention wouldn't.

Glenn Powell

Waldron is direct about Powell's value to the project. The performance splits between a conventional leading-man register and what Waldron describes as a Jim Carrey-esque idiot register, and Powell commits fully to losing scenes and being the butt of the joke in a way that not every actor at his level will do. That willingness, Waldron argues, is what makes audiences root for the character.

On the broader Hollywood-is-dying question, Waldron isn't particularly worried. His read is that audiences turn up for original stories with good performances and strong filmmaking, and that has never really changed. He points to this year's indie breakouts — The Backrooms, Iron Lung — as evidence that the model still works when the product is good.

Athletes and media

Manning's advice to young athletes thinking about media is simple: only do it if you actually want to. Twenty years ago, an athlete visibly pursuing off-field projects risked being seen as not taking the day job seriously. That stigma has mostly gone. The ceiling has risen too: Manning notes that social media fluency can carry an athlete who wouldn't otherwise have had a career into one, though it can't turn a good athlete into a great one.