Chuck: It’s not what it looks like…
By fred | July 26, 2007
(PreAir) …and “look” is all it’s got.
Chuck is a new NBC show described as a “comedic spy thriller”. Its premises are described as being about Chuck Bartowski, a computer geek who happens to be catapulted into a new career as nothing less than the government’s most vital secret agent, when he accidentally opens an e-mail that was subliminally encoded with government secrets, thus resulting in Chuck unwittingly downloading an entire server of sensitive data into his brain.
Yeah. Sounds bad, and it kinda is, only worse.
Coming from executive producer Josh Schwartz and executive producer-director McG (who previously worked together on The O.C.), the show doesn’t look like its description, yet it’s all about “looks”.
One example of that is Chuck himself (Zachary Levi), supposedly a geek, or nerd, but who looks more like a male model or some kind of L.A. actor. It doesn’t fit to the description, and gives quite a different feeling to the show. Chuck looks more like Jim from The Office than Jerry from Parker Lewis.
The perfect example is how the show in itself looks, as perfectly illustrated in one of the early scenes. We see old old buddy of Chuck, now CIA agent, stealing some data, which will eventually end up in the email Chuck will receive. This scene illustrates quite well how the show is made.
For starter, the plot sucks. Supposedly, after 9/11 CIA and NSA decided to “work together” and exchange information. This was done through one single computer, which contained absolutely all the data, encrypted into images. When sent as an email, if one were to look at those, he’ll be hypnotized and then have all the knowledge fro both CIA and NSA mixed together, with links between all of it of course.
Sounds like crap, wait to see the show, it’s worse.
Then, the computer happens to be one single computer right in the middle of a big empty white room. Made of nothing but big white squares, with nothing but the computer in the middle of it. Then they all turn into the pictures when he’s copying the files into his PDA, because even if it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever it looks great on TV.
Then the thief escapes, and as wee see him running and jumping everywhere, kicking a few soldiers/special agents on the way, it looks absolutely not credible for one second. He’s not running, they’re not fighting, everyone is like dancing, doing the well rehearsed choregraphy. It “looks” good, I guess, but it doesn’t fit, at all.
And actually, unless you’re watching the show to see pretty pictures, it looks terrible.
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You do know the difference between the words “worst” and “worse,” right? Because you are using “worst” in the place of worse…
Hmm, the first thing I thought when I saw the over-the-top action bits and the main plot was that the show isn’t taking itself all that seriously. More like having fun with the old clichés, which was brilliant. A similar, but way more obvious example of such a show is ‘Heat Vision and Jack’ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_vision_and_jack )
Of course, one could probably use the basic “(Maybe) It’s a spoof, enjoy it” argument to defend any stupid show, but there are plenty of shows out there that gain nothing from being watched from a different perspective.
So I may be wrong, and perhaps the creators are taking it all seriously. In which case it would be pretty much just as stupid and lame as you pointed out. But I’m going to be optimistic here and enjoy it for as long as I can.
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