September 23, 2007

TV: Chuck (NBC, Monday 8/7)

Chuck is a comic spy thriller in which an ordinary guy suddenly finds himself at the center of international intrigue. There's a lot of setup to be done in the first episode, there are implausibilities galore to be ignored, and the premise is on the loopy side, but this could be a lot of fun.

Chuck Barkowski (Zachary Levi) manages the tech repair team -- the "Nerd Herd" -- at a big-box electronics store. He receives an unexpected e-mail on his birthday from an old college roommate, which consists of thousands of pictures; as they start to flash on his computer screen, Chuck goes into a daze. Turns out that the old roomie is now a rogue CIA agent, and that all of those pictures are encrypted data from a CIA/NSA database. In short, Chuck's brain now carries all of the government's most important secrets, making him our most important national security asset.

Each agency sends an agent after Chuck, with different goals. The CIA's Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strzechowski) wants to protect Chuck, believing that they can find a way to access and use the data he carries; the NSA's John Casey (Adam Baldwin) believes that Chuck is a security risk and must be killed, even if it means losing the data. Obviously, Sarah wins that battle -- hard to have a series called Chuck if Chuck doesn't survive the pilot -- and it appears that she and John will be forced to work together to use Chuck as best as they can.

Zachary Levi is a terrific leading man here, and despite his natural charm and good looks, he manages to be convincing as the insecure nerd. He and Strzechowski have an easy rapport, and it seems clear that there will be a certain amount of sexual tension between them that won't ever go anywhere (well, not until the first sweeps week of the second season, anyway). Baldwin gets less screen time in the pilot, and doesn't get to do much more than glower menacingly and threaten to shoot someone.

The action sequences in the pilot are nicely done. There's a car chase that is, unlike many, shot so that we always know who's where, who's chasing who, and how they get away. And if the solution to the defusing-the-bomb sequence is telegraphed a bit too heavily, at least it's a novel solution (one that I haven't seen before, at any rate).

Biggest weakness in the cast is Joshua Gomez as Chuck's sidekick, Morgan. He's grating and unfunny, and unlike Levi, he gives no hint of a more complicated person lurking beneath the nerd cliches. With any luck, Chuck's spy adventures will take him away from the store more often. If the emphasis is on Chuck and Sarah, this could be a terrific comic drama; if the emphasis is on Chuck and Morgan, I'll lose interest very quickly.

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