Why is Chad Powers only 6 episodes? The Hulu boss gave one reason — the showrunner politely disagreed
Chad Powers runs just six episodes per season on Hulu — and the explanation depends entirely on who you ask. What the Hulu boss said about the Glen Powell comedy's short format, and how showrunner Michael Waldron responded.
Six episodes. That's what you get per season of Chad Powers, the show where Glen Powell wears a prosthetic face to play college football, which is a sentence I will never get tired of typing. Six episodes, a cliffhanger, goodbye, see you next year. And when people asked why, two men gave two different answers, and one of them very gently threw the other one under the team bus.
The official version
Hulu chief Craig Erwich went with the most Hollywood explanation available: Glen Powell is simply too busy. Which, fine — the man's IMDb page looks like a cry for help. But when The Hollywood Reporter brought that up to co-creator and showrunner Michael Waldron, he offered a correction so polite you could serve it at a garden party.
"It stopped where I would have wanted to stop it," Waldron said.
Understandable, but perhaps not entirely true, is how THR framed the boss's schedule theory. Which is journalist for lol, no.
The actual version, per the man making the show
Waldron's logic, if you assemble it:
- You physically cannot do 150 episodes of "man in latex face plays quarterback" — Powers would run out of NCAA eligibility before the writers ran out of jokes;
- the plan was always to stop at the midpoint of the football season;
- Loki — Waldron's other show — was also six episodes, and nobody stormed Disney over it;
- yes, Glen is busy, but that's the garnish, not the meal.
And then season 2 did the exact same thing
If the six-episode thing were purely a scheduling casualty, you'd expect Season 2 to stretch out once everyone cleared their calendars. Instead, the second season is also six episodes, with Waldron directing four of them himself, including the premiere and finale. That is not what "we couldn't book the star" looks like. That's what "this was the plan, please stop asking" looks like.
So: the boss says schedule, the showrunner says story, and the story version keeps winning on the field. Somewhere, Glen Powell is filming three movies at once and staying out of it, which is honestly the smartest read in the playbook.
