Chuck

By Myles I don’t think this suggests that NBC is failing, but rather that their desire to harness the power of the existing fan response, rather than attempting to stimulate and even expand that response, results in management over facilitation. While Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak have facilita...

By Myles And yes, you read that correctly: in the spirit of 24 (and launching around the same time, really), Chuck will be airing a two-hour season premiere (which is actually two episodes, as they had not planned for a lengthy premiere) on Sunday, January 10th, at 9pm before moving to their regula...

By Myles Or, really, they’re admitting that they have no idea what their brand is. If Chuck returns to NBC right now, does this actually change anything we know about NBC? It might draw better ratings than Trauma (I’d certainly hope so), and perhaps returning in the midst of low expectations could t...

By Myles Questions of Casting Jaime Weinman had a lot of valid points about just what criteria voters are using when deciding, for instance, that 30 Rock has the best casting for a comedy series. Since the award goes to a series in any year, it can’t be for the regular cast itself (unless it’s the show’...

By Myles This all doesn’t leave much room for even any other competitors: while I could cheer for Zachary Levi, Chuck was definitely a critics’ darling more than it was an industry darling, and outside of a left-field guest star nod for Chevy Chase the show won’t connect with voters.

By Myles The acting remains strong across the board here. Sure, the show didn’t figure out what to do with Joshua Gomez all season, and the Buy More folk remain criminally underdeveloped, but Baldwin and Strahovski get to nail some dramatic beats as well as a kickass fight scene, and Sarah Lancaste...

By Myles When you enter into a bittersweet series of episodes like these, knowing that the show has been canceled and that not all resolutions will be possible, an episode like “Water & Power” is a real microcosm of that feeling. As soon as the episode begins with a shot of a young Emerson Cod, you...

By Myles As for Strahovski, I made a lot of Alias comparisons in my original post, and one of them was this idea of finding unknown leading ladies (which J.J. Abrams did with Jennifer Garner on Alias, Keri Russell on Felicity, Evangeline Lilly on Lost, etc.), and how Strahovski fit the bill. Looking bac...

By Myles “Window Dressed to Kill” Season 2, Episode 11 For now, I’m going to savour these final moments: those last two episodes are kicking around, but I’m going to try to make these final episodes last as long as I can. As a result, I’ll be back with thoughts on the pentulimate episode next Saturday.

By Myles Chuck and Heroes, meanwhile, will share the Monday at 8pm timeslot, with Heroes running its course leading up to the Olympics and Chuck taking over afterwards: Heroes will be limited to roughly 18 episodes, while Chuck’s 13-episode order could potentially be extended into the summer a...

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By Myles It’s a decision that makes sense on some level, and certainly is better than getting no new episodes at all, but it also gives NBC a built-in excuse to not go any further with the series, even in its newly ad-supported form. But, like its titular hero, Chuck isn’t going to be a show to die easily...

By Myles This, to me, is actually more problematic than Chuck’s new powers: while Chuck hasn’t been fundamentally altered as a character, but rather given new ways to interact in missions outside of his current bumbling, one of the joys of Fulcrum was that it was so shadowy that it could disappear...

By Myles Cultural Observations I really like Matthew Bomer, and have liked pretty much every Bryce story they’ve done: I find the character really interesting, and felt that in an episode that had to do so much with Chuck as a character Bryce’s death was a really great launching point, well played...

By Myles Similarly, the work given to Adam Baldwin’s Casey was just great here: he was hunting them down because his feelings had been hurt more than his duty driving him, and that’s the kind of diversity of character that the show has been exhibiting all season. Schwartz has been on a creative roll a...

By Myles And the episode gave him that opportunity: Sarah and Casey were almost entirely out of the picture in this one, partly due to Chuck tranquilizing Casey in a hilarious scene and partly thanks to the way the episode operated, and it allowed him to come to terms with all of this on his own terms. C...

By Myles 05:46) - Review: Joel Plaskett’s “Three” [iTunes] TV 08:54) - NBC Bubble Shows: Friday Night Lights [Huffington Post], Chuck 13:59) - BSG Finale [SPOILER WARNING] [My Life's Work] 19:49) - February NPD [Game Sales] Results [GamaSutra] Movies 31:05) - The Juno Awards [Nominees]

By Myles When we last left Chuck, Josh Schwartz had revealed that our protagonist had been, without our knowledge, compiling information about the mysterious Fulcrum in an effort to get the intersect out of his head. It was a smart reveal because it does a lot to enhance Chuck’s character in terms o...

By Myles See, immediately upon watching last night’s episode of Chuck, I found myself preoccupied with just how similar it was to last week’s episode: it involves the same guest character (MI-6 agent Cole Barker), and the ways in which that character interacted with the group were more or less al...

By Myles It’s becoming a cliche, in other words, and this episode was ultimately no different: just as Bryce interrupted their relationship by returning to the scene, and just as Jill’s return earlier in the season turned the tables on Sarah, here we saw an MI-6 agent weasel his way into their live...

By Myles Utilizing every one of its regular cast members other than Big Mike, “Chuck vs. the Best Friend” is the kind of episode that demonstrates the show’s confidence within its second season. It connects all of Chuck’s various world in numerous different ways, allowing for the Buy More storylin...

By Myles And yet, this is all in theory: in theory this episode shouldn’t work, its central theme of “we can’t return to something that wasn’t real” being something that the show has dealt with numerous times, but in practice Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski bring so much pathos to these scenes t...

By Myles Season Two, Episode Five Entering into its second season, the expectations for Chuck were low. A smart show that never got beyond its initial 13-episode order in its first season thanks to the writers’ strike, its return was unheralded: by NBC, by critics, and by viewers.

By Myles But what we got was less an example of a good Christmas episode than it was a demonstration of Chuck’s ability to balance the emotional with the hilarious, the dramatic with the comic, and the danger with the laughter. When things seemed to be wrapping up too neatly at the halfway point of the...

By Myles But the episode did a really good job of ensuring that everyone got their due. Yes, the episode did more for Ned and Chuck as characters than it did Emerson and Olive, but this was inevitable: the resurrection of Charles Charles was going to have this affect on our characters regardless of wh...

By Myles This was, for Chuck, as good a time as any to return to the past of one John Casey, stern-faced Buy More employee in one life and…stern-faced NSA agent in the other. While I like seeing more of Casey, the episode spends a lot of time plainly stating that John Casey only has one speed: mad. There is...

By Myles As for Casey, this is definitely a lesser episode for him compared to last week (and next week, considering that we’re getting what I’d consider our first Casey-driven hour of the year with the arrival of Alias’ Carl Lumbly as his former mentor), but that doesn’t mean Casey doesn’t get to b...

By Myles But the Jill storyline gives them, also, that fantastic dramatic moment during the lockdown, as Sarah refuses to shoot Chuck despite what he was planning on doing. When the actual plot of an episode is a bit all over the place (The random puzzles got to be a bit much, and quite inaccessible, a...

By Myles If I was going to make one complaint about Chuck’s 99% sublime second season, it would be that we haven’t spent enough time on Chuck himself - sure, he had his crisis in the premiere, but the show has dealt mainly with his relationship with Sarah as opposed to really letting Zachary Levi cut l...

By Myles Chuck is in a unique position this season, already given a full season order even while its ratings are struggling. That NBC was willing to shell out a back nine for a show based on quality alone does, indeed, say something about its rather dire pilot situation, but more importantly it says s...

By Myles The former issue is perhaps less important in a broader series context on the surface, but it's actually even more valuable to the future episodes. The early episodes, outside of the pilot, had Chuck in too much of an inactive role. He was bumbling to the point of no longer being endearing, an...

By Myles Bzzzzzzzzz!" (With exactly nine Zs, I checked) is more of the same: not quite the revolution that Chuck's second season premiere was for that show's trajectory, it's an episode that smartly places the focus on the central premise of the series while allowing the opportunity for almost a...

By Myles When the TV critics started receiving their screeners for the first three episodes of Chuck's first season, there was a lot of very positive things being said about the show really flourishing in its sophomore episodes. When the first six episodes were watched by NBC, they saw enough grow...

By Myles Nate’s affair with the married woman is something that other shows have done before, and making it out and out adultery doesn’t make it any more dramatic or interesting in the way the show thinks it does. Weeds is doing a similar storyline right now, but that’s a show where the 17 year old havi...

By Myles Which makes it much more frustrating that at episode’s end they rip that all away as Chuck fears what his new life with an actual girlfriend could be like. It’s such a cheap way for them to avoid humanizing the character, and an entirely unnecessary device: considering that this was the only...

By Myles The result was an episode that, once again, did a great job of connecting the plot-of-the-week to the recurring storylines and Chuck's personal life. However, as much as a I found Rachel Bilson as enchanting as ever, an end of episode event left a sour taste in my mouth. The episode did a lot of...