At first blush, The Rebels appears to be little more than a television version of the 2000 Keanu Reeves/Gene Hackman movie The Replacements. There’s a professional football team everyone thinks is a joke, a foreign soccer player turned kicker, an eccentric Orlando-Jones-style black player, a cheerleader that’s smarter than she’s given credit for, and a down-on-his-luck quarterback with all the intangibles.

The cast reflects this parallel. The show stars performers not known for their star power–Affion Crockett from Nick Cannon’s Wild ‘N Out, Josh Beck from Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh, Hayes MacArthur best known as Wyatt from the short-lived and under-appreciated Go On, and Natalie Zea from The Following and Justified.

The writing follows a similar bent, struggling under the unique challenge a pilot presents–balancing the exposition required to start a series-propelling premise and telling a singular episode-carrying story. Still, despite it all, like any plucky group of underdogs, everything somehow coalesces into something respectable and worthy of at at least a few more episode.

The episode opens at the Los Angeles Rebels owner’s funeral, who was also the husband of Zea’s Julie Levine. She delivers an awkward, not-at-all mournful eulogy which is followed by quick establishing scenes of MacArthur’s Rick Massella being kicked out of the restaurant that bears his name because he lost it in a divorce and Crockett’s Lamont Slice ordering a monkey for no reason. The takeaways here are that Julie is alone, Rick is a quarterback looking for a break, and the current Rebels players are just immature, they’re Hangover-style immature.

The heavy handed exposition continues a bit longer as the Board of the Rebels tries to pressure Julie into selling the team to a rich white guy who wants to move it to San Antonio. It’s all pretty paint-by-the-numbers and soulless, even using Atlas Shrugged movie techniques by having the Fox Pre-Game guys deliver exposition (and shooting in a board room that Atlas Shrugged Part 2 did). I mean, why show Julie’s husband’s funeral if she never seems to be grieving at all during the episode? Then around the 8 minutes and 30 seconds mark everything changes, forcing me to say something I never thought I would.

Thank god for the formerly fat kid from Drake & Josh.

After Julie figures out she can’t raise her son let alone be the General Manager of a PFL (Professional Football Team, The Rebels’ GM just quit, I told you there was a lot of exposition), she names Peck’s Danny Norwood GM because he knows more about football than anyone she knows. From that scene on, the show becomes something different entirely–a mix of the aforementioned football flick The Replacements,  the kid-runs-a-professional-baseball-team movie from the 1990’s Angels in the Outfield, and the Jonah Hill/Channing Tatum version of 21 Jump Street.

Zea is no longer the star of this show. Peck is as Danny is forced to deal with the responsibilities of being a GM. The Rebels’ coach, played by Billie Dee Williams, gives him a list of players to cut in order to sign their top draft pick quarterback, the highly hyped Jesus Williams. His attempt to fire Slice fails, leading to his success in cutting others. Slice, the cut players, and Slice’s monkey then hold a party which culminates in Hangover hi-jinks being out Hangover’d as the monkey snorts cocaine and shoots the Argentinian kicker in the foot. The performances make the subject matter a riot. The way it’s framed in the episode pushes the show’s beyond an admirable effort and into entertaining fare.

When Julie effectively hangs a lantern on the over-the-top antics, the writing is as good as it was bad early on. She holds the players responsible for their partying, reminding them that they’re professionals and adults, revealing to us that this show has a brain. As a New England Patriots fan, I couldn’t help but picture that she was talking to Aaron Hernandez. Likewise, Danny steps up in the subsequent scene when he tells off Jesus Williams, utilizing actual football information in his argument. He gained the respect of his roster and this viewer. That bit of dialogue made me accept the possibility that this show might reflect actual football. Williams, it dawned on me, is a caricature of the overly-hyped headcase Johnny “Football” Manziel. You might even say that parallel makes the Rebels the Houston Texans.

The Rebels is without-a-doubt an attempt to capitalize on the immense popularity of professional football in this country. Putting the young Peck in the GM role allows their target demographic of young men to invest in the show as they see themselves in him. Casting Zea as the underestimated owner who calls the team’s uniforms “costumes” gives those guys’ girlfriends a reason to happily watch alongside them. I could even see the Rebels’ foreshadowed pursuit of a professional quality stadium in Los Angeles affecting the real life debate on the same issue. For these reasons and more, football fans should help this show at least get a season order.

Because I’d totally buy a Los Angeles Rebels replica jersey.