Summary
Chad Powers is very funny in “5th Quarter”, as ever, but it’s also underpinned by earnest character drama and builds to a surprising cliffhanger.
Episode 5 of Chad Powers begins with two back-to-back moments of excruciatingly awkward cringe comedy, but it ends with serious, unexpected character drama, and that’s probably Hulu’s comedy in a nutshell. It’s a servant of two masters, wedged awkwardly between its need to be funny and uncomfortable and its sneakier intention to actually be about something meaningful. One thing has to suffer when the other is prioritised. But “5th Quarter” does an impressive job of managing both for most of its runtime. When that late shift into overt dramatic territory happens, it’s only then that the awkwardness feels like it might buckle under the strain.
Until that point, this is the show in fine form. We return from Chad and Danny’s slapstick quest for glue to find the Catfish 5-0 and the talk of the town. Chad is the golden boy, a mysterious celebrity who everyone, including ESPN, is suddenly interested in. One of his new fans is a young boy recently diagnosed with leukemia who’d love nothing more than an autograph. When Chad accidentally signs it as Russ, he spends an impossibly long time coloring in the kid’s entire football. The scene’s blisteringly awkward and goes on for about five times longer than you’d think.
It’s the same with the initial sit-down interview with ESPN, who want to film a segment with Chad for College Gameday. Chad credits Benjamin Franklin for his initial interest in football, and while he’s right that dark football wouldn’t be as popular, it’s hardly a scintillating soundbite. Tricia is adamant that the segment will be integral to the Catfish’s future and that it’ll do more harm than good, letting an unfiltered Chad Powers permeate the airwaves. So, she pushes for a different, more homely segment filmed at the Hudson lakehouse with Ricky and Coach Hudson included, to manufacture a more family-oriented and naturalistic feel.
This is bad news for Russ and Danny, who are now living in a swanky new house on Catfish dime and need to perpetuate the illusion of Chad Powers, which is at considerable risk when Russ can’t freestyle charismatically and the makeup will be broadcast in 4K. Here, Episode 5 literalises the internal conflict that Russ is feeling between his competing identies by having him wear half the costume in the house and slip in and out of the voice. It’s played for laughs, but it’s also pretty telling about how he’s feeling. The mask is slipping, both literally and figuratively. He’s getting earnestly close to Ricky, and as he does so the likelihood of him letting something slip — like his real voice — drastically increases.
Russ tries to run away from what he perceives to be his curse by going for a drink in a local bar, where he hooks up with a random woman and comes to a realisation during their post-coital small talk in the back of his Cybertruck. He decides to really become Chad Powers full-time, in the process letting his actual Russ Holliday identity slough away. Danny is petrified by this idea for very understandable reasons, since it’s virtually indistinguishable from some sort of breakdown, but Russ is adamant, and leaves for the TV spot in full Chad regalia.
Which is when everything goes badly wrong. When he arrives, he’s introduced to Coach Hudson’s wife, Wendy, who turns out to be the woman he slept with the previous evening. The heavily manufactured happy-family TV spot quickly becomes a deeply personal argument between Wendy and Jake, with the former complaining about him always being too busy to spend time with her and the latter complaining that she keeps cheating on him while he’s trying to keep his career going. Chad and Ricky are both just sat there awkwardly, but it’s worse for the former since Wendy openly confesses to her tryst with Russ, which seems to tip Jake over the edge.
Sat awkwardly inside, Ricky mentions bumping into Russ in the hotel. It now seems like he has a personal crusade against her family. When Jake comes inside, he mentions how he didn’t recruit Russ in high school because he could tell, even then, that he was “a cancer”. Russ has to sit there and take it in his Chad disguise. However, the tables turn on Jake pretty much instantly, since when he calls Ricky over for what she thinks is emotional support, he tells her to ring an ambulance. He’s having a heart attack.
RELATED:
