Glen Powell to Star in College Football Comedy Series Based on Viral Eli Manning Character
Chad Powers is getting his own show.
In 2022, former New York Giants and Ole Miss quarterback Eli Manning underwent a transformation.
For an episode of Eli’s Places—his college football docuseries on ESPN+—Manning went undercover at Penn State’s walk-on tryouts as a player named Chad Powers. The self-deprecating segment turned into a huge hit, and has currently been viewed over 15 million times on ESPN’s YouTube channel.
According to Variety, that segment is now set to become a series on Hulu starring Glen Powell. The Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You star will co-create the show alongside screenwriter Michael Waldron; the Manning brothers will serve as executive producers.
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“We’re both diehard college football fans. When we saw Eli as Chad Powers, we knew that was the way into a big, fun story about this world,” Powell and Waldron told Variety in a statement.
Per the showrunners, the story will follow Powell’s character as he “disguises himself and walks onto a struggling Southern football team as the talented, affable Chad Powers.”
As Variety noted, Apple TV+’s critical and commercial smash Ted Lasso arose from a similar premise—a series of early-2010s promotional segments for NBC’s Premier League broadcasts starring Jason Sudeikis.