by Hudson Moura
In a season crowded with star-led vehicles, two projects stand out for how explicitly they turn performance into subject matter: Chad Powers (2025) and The Lowdown (2025). Each is a “personal project” that mirrors its lead’s industrial position—rising star Glen Powell builds Chad Powers on literal transformation, extending Eli Manning’s viral Eli’s Places disguise into prosthetics, alias, and on-field reinvention, while established figure Ethan Hawke steers The Lowdown through genre modulation, marrying western-noir cadence to a practiced, weary charisma that revisits the American tradition of the marginal truth-seeker policing the moral order.
Staged in unmistakably American arenas—the football field’s Friday-night lights for Chad Powers, and Tulsa’s oil-boom shadows for The Lowdown—both series probe performance as identity: the former tests rehabilitation through self-refashioning; the latter performs archetype through tone and posture. Their shortcomings diverge—Chad Powers lacks a sustained antagonist and a deeper bench, while The Lowdown needs more character granularity and a bolder formal conceit—yet both are intermittently gripping without fully escaping the gravity of their chosen templates.
Chad Powers (Glen Powell)
Chad Powers is a redemption story built on disguise. Russ Holiday, a disgraced quarterback who cost his team a championship and accidentally injured a child on national television, spends eight years cycling through reality-TV humiliations before reinventing himself—via prosthetics and persona—as “Chad Powers” to crash open tryouts for South Georgia’s Catfish. The Mrs. Doubtfire echo is explicit; the twist is that Russ’s father is a veteran Hollywood makeup artist, turning the series’ central theme—second chances—into a craft of literal refashioning.
The series’ strongest material lives on the field and in the coaching room. Game sequences have tempo and clarity, and the coaches’ tactical debates supply the show’s most convincing dramatic friction. Glen Powell, who also steers the series, plays the dual register—Russ abrasive, Chad attentive—with sufficient differentiation to make the masquerade legible. The writing mines this split for ethical questions about authenticity and rehabilitation in a cancelation culture: does performing a better self constitute growth, or merely better camouflage?
Two interlocking father–child arcs deepen the stakes: Russ’s dependence on his father’s prosthetic expertise and estranged relationship, and the fraught, professional bond between head coach Jake Hudson (Steve Zahn) and his daughter, the impressively drawn assistant coach Ricky Hudson (Petty Mattfeld). Ricky is the show’s best surprise—more fully developed than many comparable roles in sports TV—and the presence of a woman as the new team boss productively unsettles the locker-room hierarchy.
Yet the series undercuts itself in three ways. First, it often asks Powell to “play dumb” in the Chad improv beats, leaning into a caricature of diminished intellect that reads as an ableist tic rather than a character choice. The comedy here is both predictable, awkward, and ethically thin. Second, the bench is shallow. Early scenes suggest a lively ensemble—Whiskers/Danny (Frankie A. Rodriguez), the mascot and confidant who aids the transformation is especially promising—but most secondary figures fade into orbit around Chad/Russ. Third, the macro-conflict is narrow: suspense rests almost entirely on whether the ruse will be exposed. Without a credible antagonist or a counter-voice actively threatening revelation, episodes drift toward repetition. The series knows what it wants to say about reinvention, but it struggles to stage escalating opposition to that desire.
Energetic game craft, a compelling female coaching lead, and a resonant fatherhood motif worth the ride. 
3/5
Chad Powers streaming starts on Disney+ on September 29th
The Lowdown (Ethan Hawke)
The Lowdown casts Ethan Hawke as a reporter chasing “one big scoop” through a small town where bodies, bribes, and backroom deals pile up. The show splices western posture (frontier law, personal codes) into a film-noir chassis (voiceover logic, crooked officials, moral rot), positioning Hawke as a weary detective in all but name. The town is populated with regional types—colorful, funny, and emphatically archetypal.
The series moves quickly—a rollercoaster of plot turns and colorful encounters—but the velocity exposes a design problem: it leans on genre shorthand so heavily that character specificity thins out. Hawke is magnetic enough to hold the center; still, the performance oscillates between finely etched restraint and a near-parodic replay of the “marginal gumshoe” template. The question that lingers—Is he subtly deconstructing the archetype, or simply coasting on it?—remains unresolved across episodes.
Stylistically, the hybrid western-noir idiom has promise: it frames local corruption as a civic frontier where journalism substitutes for the sheriff’s badge. Yet the scripts too often default to familiar beats (the compromised ally, the ominous diner, the ritualized threat) without the counterpoint of a truly unexpected foil or a fresh structural gambit. What registers most is craft competence rather than vision.
Pace and atmosphere to spare, colorful characters, and Hawke’s charisma keeps the engine running are the strenghts of this series. 3/5
The Lowdown streaming starts on Disney+ on September 22nd