Chuck: The Complete First Season

The Nerd Herder Who Loved Me
NBC's CHUCK is such a welcome surprise and one of the best and funniest TV shows I've seen in a while, something which normally is an omen for immediate cancellation (but, thankfully, NBC picked it up for the full season). CHUCK achieves that heady mix of humor, action, espionage, and even a dash of romance (or pining, to be more exact). And it'll have you rooting for the nerd hero Chuck Bartowski, the physically hapless but nonetheless invaluable new member of the U.S. secret agent fraternity. Whereas, before, Chuck was someone who for thrills lived life vicariously thru video games and films, he's all of a sudden forced to cope with experiencing the very intense real thing.

Several SPOILERS follow.

The 411 on the premise and plot: A rogue CIA agent, just before being killed, downloads a wealth of top secret government files into the brain of his old college roommate Chuck Bartowski, a seemingly disastrous choice at first blush. Chuck is a social misfit, a...

Action, Comedy, Romance, Intrigue.... I Can Go On If You Want
Chuck Bartowski's (Zachary Levi) life was going no where fast. True, he is head of the Nerd Herd at his local Buy More. But he lives with his sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster) and her boyfriend Devon (aka Captain Awesome, played by Ryan McPartlin). His best friend is Morgan (Joshua Gomez), a fellow nerd who also works at Buy More.

But things change drastically when Chuck gets an e-mail from former friend Bryce Larkin. The e-mail contains all the files of the intersect, the complete intelligence files of both the CIA and the NSA. And, to make things more exciting, Bryce has destroyed the original files.

All the information gets downloaded into Chuck's brain, making him a highly valuable government secret. So valuable that he has two bodyguards, Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski), a CIA agent who pretends to be Chuck's girlfriend, and John Casey (Adam Baldwin), a NSA who moves in next door to Chuck and takes a job at Buy More.

Whenever Chuck sees...

One of the better new series of the strike-shortened 2007-2008 season
CHUCK did the one thing that any good series needs to do: it managed to get better as it went along. To enjoy it one has to be able to suspend quite a bit of disbelief. One has to imagine it somehow possible for someone to have the entire contents of the CIA computer database downloaded into the brain of a single human being. One further has to imagine that this person would "flash" on seeing people, objects, names, or whatever, recognizing a series of connections that would escape any other person. Finally, you have to accept that this individual would continue to work in their poorly paid job at Buy More while his advisors from the CIA and the NSA would work either alongside him in Buy More or nearby in a wiener fast foot joint. A plausible premise? Of course not! But if you cut it a lot of slack it provides one heck of a fun ride.

Why would one cut it slack? Well, first and foremost because Zachary Levi is delightful in the title role. As Chuck, Levi is able to...

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