Chuck: "Pilot"

Mike says Geek Power! Chuck led the charge in the current "Geek friendly" trend on TV, cashing in on the combination of action/comedy made famous by Joss and throwing in plenty of pop culture references. I love the show to death, though oddly, I've only seen the first season.

Chuck--a "Nerd Herd" manager (think Geek Squad)--by a strange twist of fate, gets the entirety of the CIA and NSA's secrets downloaded into his head. Protected by an agent from each, hilarity ensues.

The show is great. It's fast paced, funny, and loaded with pop culture. Despite all this greatness, I find myself shallowly obsessed with Sarah (CIA agent and love interest) and her teeth. Can a woman that attractive make buck teeth sexy? You decide.

Anyway, the "Pilot" is a wonderful condensed bullet of information that downloads everything you need to know about the show directly into your brain, and quickly. While the show does later delve into conspiracies and mysteries, the pilot, like so may others, focuses on a problem. Several in fact. Despite this, the pilot is enjoyable and well written... mostly.

My only real problem is the date that Sarah lures Chuck onto... for some reason, their chemistry doesn't really click for me. Sarah seems like she's acting--the dialog is awkward and odd. In fact, Chuck and Sarah really don't seem to work until Adam Baldwin is thrown in. At that point, the show cooks, and it continues to cook throughout the season.

The acting is wonderful--they did a great job with casting. I also think that Chuck is a show that learns from the past: "Geeks like Whedon, so let's write like him!" The dialog is crisp, witty, and quick. I love it.

The season is tight, with plenty of stand alone and "mythology" episodes. All in all, a great, lovable show--and a great compromise for a geek and his lady; Happily, Chuck is one of the few shows I can watch with the wife without one of us slightly wincing at what we're watching.

Kate says this show is completely adorable. And Adam Baldwin is in it!

First off, we truly are living in the age of the nerd/geek. In the 80's, nerds were in style, but they were all portrayed as, well, Morgans (who is necessary to the show, even if a stereotype). Nerds/geeks could be redeemed but only by finding their cool sides.

What is so great about nerds/geeks today, like in Big Bang Theory and Chuck, is that they are allowed to remain themselves: savvy about computers, totally obsessed with video-games . . . (Thank you, Bill Gates.)

And slightly sarcastic. Zachary Levi as Chuck plays a great straight man who is also impossibly sweet. And impossibly tall. (He is the same height as Adam Baldwin. It's the land of the giants!)

Sarah Walker, his "handler," is excellently played by Yvonne Strahovski. She manages the sweet but killer spy persona very well; there's a 7-of-9 quality to her acting.

And I like the sister as well as Captain Awesome.

But I don't think the show would work without Baldwin. Without Baldwin, it would just be Scarecrow & Mrs. King, which I love, by the way, but which isn't all that gripping. In order to make the action sequences work in an action/mystery show, there needs be a third element at work (such as Pamela Landy with Bourne v. Kirill in Bourne Supremacy). Adam Baldwin is absolutely perfect as that third element: the ambiguous tougher than tough spy guy. His relationship with Sarah adds a extra layer to what would otherwise just be Chuck "thawing" the tough but sweet spy lady.

Not to forget, Baldwin is great with deadpan: "Damn tranq dart," he says in Episode 2 after falling over but still managing to get up because he IS the tougher than tough spy guy.

The combination/play-offs between Casey (Baldwin), Chuck, and Sarah create extremely funny moments. I'm still laughing about the souffle (which is in Episode 2).

The only flaw to the show, which seems radically obvious and therefore radically confusing (how did the writers miss this?), is how will Chuck come up with NEW intel? In the world of intelligence, stuff you get out of the World Book Encyclopedia is only moderately useful. The really useful stuff is the latest intelligence.

But I will pretend that Bryce arranged for this eventuality and just enjoy the show!