‘Chad Powers’ Asks What A National Championship Is Really Worth In Season 2

SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from Season 2 of Hulu‘s Chad Powers. Russ Holliday could be the reason the South Georgia Catfish finally conquer college football — or, he could be the reason the team goes down in infamy. It’s still up in the air. If it seemed like the lie at the center of Hulu’s Chad Powers was already spiraling out of control, Season 2 sends Russ (Glen Powell) absolutely scrambling to keep his real identity under wraps. With Ricky (Perry Mattfeld) in the know about his alter ego as Chad Powers, it seems for a moment like things might get easier. Sure, she’s pissed that she’s been roped into this in the first place, but especially considering her dad Coach Hudson (Steve Zahn) just had a heart attack, she’s not inclined to let the truth continue to spread. “I think that, really, at the end of last season, the show almost became what the show always actually wanted to be when Ricky found out, because suddenly the show could have a real conscience, and there could be someone as the voice of the audience saying, ‘This is insane. This is stupid. What are you thinking? Why are you acting so weird? Why are you going about it this way? Think about the consequences,'” says Michael Waldron, who created the show with Powell. Watch on Deadline He tells Deadline they “try to just run head on at that” philosophy in Season 2. Fairly quickly, that also begs another question: What is the endgame here? Disney “That was a thing that I talked about a lot with Glen at the top of the season. What do we imagine Russ is really thinking?” Waldron explained. “The thing that Glen always said that struck me was that, in his mind, Russ is just thinking about crossing the goal line, winning the National Championship, and then it’s almost like credits roll for him. But this is real life, and getting to interrogate that in a real dramatic way kind of became the engine of Season 2.” The path to the National Championship is littered with obstacles, though, and at some point in Season 2 the team’s tough schedule becomes the least of the problems ahead. To a certain extent, everyone is kind of onto Chad in Season 2. After all, there is only so long that a guy trying to pull a Mrs. Doubtfire on a college football team could get away with such a ruse, especially when every suspicious question is met with an increasingly weird explanation. After enough gaslighting eventually triggers a full psychotic break, Gerry (Colton Ryan) is the one who figures it out. While he does everything in his power to reveal the truth, Russ, Danny (Frankie Rodriguez) and Ricky go to great lengths to undermine him. When Danny plants a 3D-printed gun in Gerry’s football locker, one has to wonder whether the show’s heroes are taking it too far. “I think that the original sin of the show is Russ makes the choice to become Chad Powers, and that makes everyone go insane. It’s the truth that makes Jerry go insane. Look at the things that Danny and Ricky are doing,” Waldron said, also arguing that “maybe all those characters were capable of that to begin with, so he’s kind of just in some ways taking their own mask off.” But, he adds: “In light of Season 2, I think the actual worst decision was probably Danny tripping Jerry, because look at the cascading effects. Danny is the one willing to sort of do these these awful crazy things to keep the lie going that usually lead to more disastrous consequences down the line.” Waldron acknowledges that the show’s premise has reached “maximum suspension of disbelief,” but he and Powell still aim to center the show around a fairly grounded, simple question that many athletes, coaches and sports fans alike have probably asked themselves over the years. “We’re constantly asking our characters: How far would you go to win, and is winning the most important thing?” he says. By the end of Season 2, even as the lies mount and the consequences for everyone become greater, Waldron thinks most of the characters still believe the answer is yes. As do the actors. So, none of them are particularly surprised that Danny would rather involve the team’s nefarious booster Trisha (Wynn Everett) than let the truth come out. “I think it insulates the lie in a much better way,” Powell tells Deadline. “Anybody that goes into college football, you know that boosters run the show, and they’re extremely powerful people that are sort of the puppeteers around things and are extremely connected and are willing to win at all costs…Sure, she’s in the lie now, but it actually creates a bit of a second life to be able to pull this off at the highest level as they get further and further along.” Disney That’s probably why Russ and Ricky were feeling confident and careless enough to start passionately making out (and ripping off the former’s prosthetics) in the locker room after a game. The season ends with Coach Hudson walking in on the pair, leaving them in a sticky situation come Season 3. The camera angle makes it hard to tell what, if anything, Coach saw before the scene cut to black, but it’s likely that Ricky and Russ will either need to come clean or let Coach believe that his daughter and a member of the coaching staff is in a relationship with a student athlete. “So, if and when Hudson was to find out that Chad Powers is Russ Holliday, who slept with his wife and all of that, would he be able to swallow that pill to try and win?” Waldron posits. He says he and the writers often looked to Breaking Bad as inspiration for the dramatic twists and turns this lie takes their characters on, adding: “That’s the equivalent of Hank finding out that Walter White is Heisenberg. So that’s probably our last big card to turn over in the show, and if and when we do it, I know Steve will certainly be electric.” When asked which would be a worse piece of information to learn, Zahn is stumped. Would Coach Hudson, too, be willing to sell his soul for a National Championship? Coach Hudson is obviously “extremely fragile,” Zahn says, and “he’s good at hiding it, as I think most coaches are.” “I mean, I don’t know, because he’s really tight with his daughter, and that’s kind of everything. But he’s very vocal about winning. It defines his life,” he tells Deadline. Mattfeld, for what it’s worth, thinks Ricky would much rather suffer her own consequences than even let her dad in on Russ’ secret. “I think she loves her dad so much and wants this for him so much. I think she’d rather get fired and him win,” she said. Disney Waldron and Powell plan to end the series with a third season, if it’s renewed. That said, there are plenty of loose ends to tie up to bring this convoluted story to a satisfying conclusion. Whatever ultimately happens to these characters, Waldron says he doesn’t want the show to get away from them too much. “I imagine a third season will be looking at all the the pieces that we’ve arranged and saying, ‘Well, how would this realistically play out? What would the realistic consequences be?'” he says. “And deciding from there whether that’s a happy ending or a tragic one.”