{"id":11280,"date":"2007-10-04T15:21:46","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T22:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2007\/10\/04\/tv-review-chuck.html"},"modified":"2007-10-04T15:21:46","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T22:21:46","slug":"tv_review_chuck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/10\/04\/tv_review_chuck.html","title":{"rendered":"TV Review: Chuck<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Watched the first few eps of Chuck<\/a> <\/em>off the DVR last night.  Good fun, plenty of chuckles, enough bite to lend it a bit of substance, but nothing too heavy or serious.<\/p>\n

Basic premise: Chuck is a serious nigh-stereotypical computer nerd, painfully single, still smarting over his old college buddy getting him kicked out of Stanford (and stealing his girl), spending his days as head “Geek Squad”-style techie at a Best Buy-esque store (insert The Office <\/em>riffs here), and his nights playing video games with his fellow nerd-loser friend Morgan.  Until the day when that old college buddy of his — who seems to be a rogue CIA agent — downloads (and demolishes) a joint CIA\/NSA intel integrating computer, then before he dies downloads the data in an e-mail to Chuck — which intel then gets implanted in his head.  Hilarity — and spy games and car chases and narrowly-averted assassinations — ensue.<\/p>\n

The info in Chuck’s head is invaluable, but neither the CIA nor the NSA seem willing to pull him in to sweat it all out again, especially since Chuck’s doing a fine job integrating info at random times and helping the Feds nail the bad guys — but they do give him two escorts who seem to spend as much time trying to screw each other other as protect their country.  The CIA agent is a stunning — and deadly — blond beauty, publicly Chuck’s impossible girlfriend — while the NSA agent  (Adam Baldwin) is a churlish killer (think Robert Culp’s character from Greatest American Hero<\/em>, only without being sure if  he’s going to protect or gun down the protagonist next time they meet), now also working at the Best Buy-esque store as a trainee salesman.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there’s more than a bit of Greatest American Hero<\/em> flare to the series, with a bit of Bond, a hint of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes<\/em>, some Fugitive<\/em>, large dollops of 00s cynicism about the Big Brother government (thank you, George W. Bush, for making the NSA into a band of info-hoarding assassins), a bit of True Lies <\/em>tossed in for good measure (duck out of water civilian in the spy game), and, of course, fan service galore (of all sorts) for the geek\/nerd audience NBC is trying very hard to attract.<\/p>\n

To date the two episodes have been largely stand-alone, with some light arc in the background — when will the NSA decide it’s time to bump off Chuck, can the lovely CIA agent really be trusted, etc. — meaning that missing an ep isn’t going to mean you lose the entire thread of the show. <\/p>\n

Quite decent entertainment, all told. Nothing to tell my grand-kids about, as of yet, but I’ll be back for more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watched the first few eps of Chuck off the DVR last night.  Good fun, plenty of chuckles, enough bite to lend it a bit of substance, but nothing too…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-tv"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12140,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/11\/07\/tv_im_watching.html","url_meta":{"origin":11280,"position":0},"title":"TV I’m Watching","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 7-Nov-07 10:22am","format":false,"excerpt":"We watch about 90-95% of our TV off of our DVR, which seems fairly remarkable.\u00a0 So what is it I'm watching these days? 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Annoyingly, we've never caught up on Heroes from last season.\u00a0 Rrg....","rel":"","context":"In "TV"","block_context":{"text":"TV","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-tv"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7687,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/18\/whats_on_your_t.html","url_meta":{"origin":11280,"position":2},"title":"What’s on your TiVo?","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 18-Jan-05 6:30am","format":false,"excerpt":"So, now that we have this Comcast DVR, what sorts of rare and wonderful gems do we have on there, you ask? 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