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| Tuesday, January 1, 2008 10:13 AM |
| On the Viewer: Chuck ("Pilot") |
 by Fëanor |
Chuck was one of a handful of new shows this past TV season that interested me, so I purchased the first, pilot episode of the show off of the iTunes Music Store a while back. I just recently got around to watching it. Chuck, if you don't know, is a show about a nerd/geek named (you guessed it!) Chuck who works as one of the Nerd Herd (which is essentially the Geek Squad) at Buy More (which is essentially Best Buy), lives with his sister and her boyfriend (a particularly funny character whom Chuck refers to as "Captain Awesome" because of his tendency to use the word "awesome" to describe nearly everything), and doesn't have much of a life - until one night, when he gets an email from the guy who stole his girl back in college. Turns out dude is now a secret agent who stole all the secrets out of a special CIA/NSA computer and, just before he was killed, sent them all to Chuck in an email, encoded in a series of images. By opening the email and seeing the images, Chuck somehow becomes the computer. All of the secrets are in his head, and seeing or experiencing certain things can trigger recall of one or more of them.
Of course, having all this knowledge in his head makes Chuck important to both the NSA and the CIA. A hard-ass NSA agent comes to town with the intention of eliminating Chuck, but a beautiful, sexy CIA agent has already fallen for Chuck and wants to protect him. They settle on an uneasy truce - Chuck can live if he agrees to tell no one about any of this, and to help them use his brain to defuse bombs and stop terrorist incidents and so forth.
It's an amusing premise, and the actors involved play their parts well. The guy who plays Chuck is particularly funny and likable, and his nerdy friend is pretty great, too. It also doesn't hurt that his female co-star is quite lovely, the dialogue is rather clever, and the action is exciting and well-staged. Really my only complaint is that the things they do with technology are often very hard to believe. The idea that a guy could see a bunch of pictures and then his brain would essentially become a computer full of complex secrets is pretty ridiculous, but cool enough that I'm willing to let it go. What bugs me the most in this particular episode is (spoilers ahead) the way Chuck defuses the bomb at the end. I'll buy that he might have been able to use a DOS override to access the laptop, and that a computer virus might well have fried the computer and stopped the countdown. But it seems extremely unlikely to me that the laptop strapped to the bomb would also be hooked up to the internet.
But the point is, this was a fun pilot, and if I thought I could get it together to watch a show regularly on TV, I'd probably try to watch Chuck. I'm not sure I liked it enough to actually buy all the episodes on iTunes, so what I'll probably end up doing is waiting until it comes out on DVD and then renting it on Netflix. |
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