Chuck vs The Grumpy Bulldog

I haven't felt like writing a blog entry in a couple of weeks and no one seemed to notice or care, so whatever.  But whenever I watch another TV series thanks to social distancing or self-isolating or whatever, I like to write some of my thoughts on it.  Because why not?

Anyway, Chuck was an NBC series from 2008-2012 and while my sisters were fans, I never really got around to watching it.  Just like I never got around to watching other NBC series of that era like Community and Parks & Recreation until later when I binged them on streaming.  I still haven't gotten around to binging The Office yet either.

Anyway, again, this show was about the eponymous Chuck Bartowski who works for the Nerd Herd at the Buy More, which is like the Geek Squad of Best Buy.  He lives in Burbank, CA with his sister, who is way too overprotective and interested in what he does, and his sister's boyfriend Devon, aka Captain Awesome because he's a really hot doctor who does stuff like climb mountains barehanded and go down white water rapids for fun and so on.

One night, after his overprotective sister tries to set him up with some girls, Chuck gets an email from an old friend.  When he opens it and inadvertently answers with the right code, he gets a whole bunch of CIA/NSA secrets zapped into his head.  It's this computer system called "the Intersect" because I guess it was supposed to be the intersection of all these intelligence agency systems.

Because of this, when Chuck sees something like a person or object that's referenced in the Intersect, he "flashes" and sort of instantly downloads all the information into his consciousness.  It's a neat trick, but it also makes the government take a vested interest in him.  Rival agents Sarah Walker of the CIA and John Casey of the NSA work covertly to capture him, but when he flashes on something they have to take down a bad guy, which for Chuck is not nearly as fun or awesome as in movies or TV.

By the end of the pilot the government wants to put Chuck in a lab somewhere, but he uses his leverage of being the only one with the Intersect to stay in Burbank and continue with his normal life--more or less.  Casey takes a job at the Buy More while Sarah works across the way at a hot dog restaurant so they can keep an eye on him.

The first season then is mostly just Chuck flashes on something and then with Casey and Walker they have to go stop whatever bad guy.  An organization called Fulcrum is the big bad for season 1 and season 2.  Also in season 2 we meet Chuck's dad (played by Scott Bakula of Quantum Leap and Enterprise), the scientist who created the Intersect and then went on the run from the government, leaving his family behind.  His former partner (Chevy Chase of Vacation and Community) is a big software guy who is also the leader of Fulcrum.  After taking him down, Chuck gets the Intersect removed but then inadvertently gets a new version beamed into his head.

The new version is sort of like The Matrix where he can instantly learn skills like kung-fu, how to pilot a plane, or basically any language he hears or sees.  So a lot of season 3 is him learning to use that and trying to become a professional spy.  He and Sarah started expressing their feelings for each other in the previous seasons but season 3 is when they start to get hotter and heavier, which is complicated when the government brings in a new team leader in the form of Daniel Shaw (Brandon Routh of Superman Returns infamy) whom Sarah gets a crush on.  Kristin Kreuk of Smallville is brought in for about 3 episodes as a competing love interest for Chuck, though nothing really ever comes of that.  It wasn't really believable that someone flying first class to Paris would instantly move to Burbank and work at the Buy More just to see some guy she met on the plane and then he's never around her anyway.  I thought she might turn out to be a bad guy, but nope.

Shaw is an expert on the season 3 big bad "the Ring," not to be confused with that movie about the killer videotape.  He thinks his wife was killed by the Ring, but when he's captured, they show him that it was really Sarah who killed his wife, thinking she was a terrorist.  Finding that out, Shaw becomes a double-agent and gets his own Intersect and kills Chuck's dad.  The bitter irony is that when Shaw and Chuck fight it's probably the closest to a Superman-Shazam fight we'll ever see.

At the end of Season 3, Chuck finds a hidden base used by his father and starts to search for his mother.  So in season 4 he finds out his mother (Linda Hamilton of The Terminator) is a deep cover agent working for a guy named Alexei Volkoff (Timothy Dalton of two James Bond movies) in Russia.  While trying to reunite with his mom and take down Volkoff, Chuck and Sarah also plan to get married.

At the end of Season 4, Chuck gets the Intersect out of his head and is fired by a CIA honcho named Decker.  But flush with cash from Volkoff, he decides to start his own company with Sarah and Casey.  And then his friend Morgan finds a pair of glasses that gives him the Intersect.

Season 5 is my least favorite as like with seasons 5-7 of Archer, they have him split from the government but then don't really seem to know what to do with that idea.  His private spy company is floundering, badly overshadowed by the competing Verbanski Corp led by Gertrude Verbanski (Carrie-Anne Moss of The Matrix and Memento), who has a thing for John Casey.  Morgan's use of the Intersect turns him into a huge douchebag who loses a lot of his old memories, so that they eventually have to get the Intersect out of him.  Then Decker sets Chuck up to take the fall for the release of a dangerous computer virus and after Verbanski literally blows Decker up, they find out Shaw was really behind it all.  So they have to take him down.  Then some other guy named Quinn wants a copy of the Intersect that Morgan hid when he was a huge tool under the spell of the Intersect.  Sarah uses that Intersect when she and Casey are cornered in a trap but then she's eventually captured by Quinn, who erases her memories of the last 5 years and sends her after Chuck...but of course she can't kill him and thanks to Casey giving her a log she made of her "mission" as Chuck's handler in the first 2 seasons, she realizes Quinn is the bad guy.  They go after him and something called "the Key" that like in a GI JOE miniseries is broken into 3 pieces, the last of which is possessed by their old boss General Beckman.  Quinn puts a bomb under her seat in a concert hall and if the music stops, the bomb will go off.  They catch up with Quinn and get his Intersect glasses hoping to use them to restore Sarah's memory, but to defuse the bomb, Chuck puts on the glasses while his coworkers from the Buy More keep the music going with a fairly decent cover of "Take on Me."  And the day is saved but Sarah's memory still isn't back.  The show ends on a beach with her and Chuck kissing and snuggling and maybe her memory will come back or maybe they'll just start over.  Or whatever.  The end.

It didn't surprise me that this show was produced by Warner Bros because it largely follows the same template as Smallville and most of the later superhero shows on CW.  Only instead of superheroes it's about super spies.  There are a lot of the same tropes like the main character is kind of outside normal society.  He has a best friend of a different ethnicity (Morgan being Latino).  There's the will they-won't they love story that stretches out for a few seasons.  At first only a couple of people know his secret.  Then his best friend finds out.  Then Captain Awesome finds out.  Then his sister finds out.  And so on until pretty much by the end everyone knows.  And while it starts off with fairly simple bad guy-of-the-week stories, as the show goes on they have to keep adding to the history of the Intersect, just like how Smallville kept adding to the history of Krypton or Arrow kept adding to the history of Oliver's time after washing up on the island, or how The Flash keeps adding to his powers and the "Speed Force" and all that.

One thing I didn't like were some of Chuck's co-workers at the Buy More.  Morgan is OK and his boss "Big Mike" was mostly fine, though probably under-used considering they added him to the credits in season 2.  Lester and Jeff were just creepy and not really funny creepy.  More just annoying creepy and when the Buy More burns down in season 3 I was really hoping they wouldn't be back, but unfortunately they were.  They had another co-worker, an Asian girl named Julie who went out with Morgan for a little while, but she got written out after season 2, which made sense because the show really didn't seem to know what to do with her.

Another little thing was in the beginning there's a line between the NSA and CIA, who are sort of competitors for the Intersect.  But as the show goes on, the line blurs and it starts to get hazy in terms of who's working for who.  General Beckman, their overall boss, was supposed to be NSA but then she seems to also be a supervisor of CIA people too?  It doesn't really make a lot of sense, but it's probably just more convenient that way.

Anyway, especially if you like those CW shows then you would probably like this too.  For the most part I enjoyed it as a light action-comedy series.  I guess you could also compare it to shows like Monk or Psych on USA that combined comedy with mystery, though in this case less mystery and more action.  The final season isn't as good, but the other 4 seasons are mostly fun if you've burned through other stuff on your queue and are looking for something else to watch.  If for no other reason, watch some episodes of seasons 3-5 just because the girl playing Casey's daughter is a super cute redhead.  Just saying.

I streamed it free with Amazon Prime but it might be on Netflix or Hulu or maybe that new Peacock thing coming out since it was on NBC.

Fun Facts:  Robert Duncan McNeill (Parris on Star Trek Voyager) was a producer and frequent episode director.  His Voyager co-stars Robert Picardo and Ethan Phillips appeared as guest stars on the show.  John Casey was played by Adam Baldwin of Firefly, and also did a couple of cameos on Leverage, another show I watched recently.  A Chuck/Leverage crossover would have been awesome.

As an aside, that Zachary Levi was on this show and then in Shazam is another case of where most of Warner Bros superhero actors have been in some other Warner-related product.  Like Ben Affleck did Argo, The Town, and Gone Baby Gone through WB before getting hired for BvS.  Or Jason Mamoa was in Game of Thrones which was on HBO, which is part of the same conglomerate as WB.  I could probably find some other instances.  It seems kind of old-school Hollywood that way but then WB is one of the big movie studios so I suppose it's hard not to have done some work for them.  It's just a little conspiracy theory I've been toying with.

(Though you probably weren't wondering, this blog entry is titled like an episode of the show where each episode was called Chuck vs...whatever.)