Chuck – Pilot Review

On Friday, the better half and I caught the pilot of NBC’c Chuck, kind of The Office-meets-The 40 Year Old Virgin-meets-Alias from OC creators Josh Schwartz and McG.

It’s a good fun pilot and while personally I preferred New Amsterdam, I think that Chuck will get more viewers and have a longer life. Chuck – played by Zachary Levi – is a twenty-something geek working for Geek Squad Nerd Herd in Best Buy Buy More with best friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez), living with his doctor sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster) and her boyfriend the hilarious Captain Awesome (trust me on this: he is Awsome).

Chuck’s former college roommate Bryce – in a great tongue-in-cheek action cameo by too-handsome-for-regular-work Matthew Bomer – sends an email to the eponymous loser which contains all the country’s secrets just before destroying the only other copy of those secrets. When the email is opened, all of these are downloaded straight into Chuck’s brain – and he starts to know things and recognise patterns in events that he couldn’t see previously.

Cue two agents moving in to see who this Chuck guy is; the beautiful CIA agent Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) that happened to be Bryce’s ex and the tough NSA agent John Casey (Adam Baldwin) who happened to be the guy who gunned him down. One wants to finagle the information from him, one wants to strap him down and get it out any way he can.

The problem is that this whole thing doesn’t make much sense. Motives are blurry – especially as regards the NSA side of things – and the resoution to the CIA/NSA conflict is pretty unsatisfactory. There’s also no indication of why Bryce would send this information to Chuck, especially as he hasn’t seen him in years. We also don’t know why Bryce went rogue. (I’m sure these last two points will be focuses on the show, but y’know, annoying).

As a pilot, it sets up the status quo for the series well, but the mixed comedy and action tones doen’t always gel together especially as regards Bryce’s death and John’s eventual role. I’m also curious as to how we’re going to get ‘missions’ every week – its not like Chuck’s mind is getting updated with new information all the time.

Still, it’s well acted, wittily scripted and mind-numbingly enjoyable – but when the best bits come from Chuck’s interactions with Captain Awesome, Morgan and his fellow Buy More employees, it feels like the action-spy bit is pretty much unnecessary.

Oh, and Tony Todd is criminally underused as Sarah’s boss.

Chuck premieres on NBC September 24th at 8 – leading into some show called Heroes. There’s also a fun Chuck site here.

Tags: Chuck, TV-Archived

This entry was posted on September 10, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Archive, Comics-Archived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.