About.com Rating

Chuck is based around the idea of an ordinary guy who accidentally ends up with a ton of government secrets in his brain, turning him into the latest in a long line of unlikely government agents.

The show has its moments and its production values are excellent, but it somehow never comes to life, remaining stuck in the high concept, "wouldn't it be cool if some nerd got stuck with all the government's secrets" phase.

The show ends up being about how funny the premise is, not who the characters are.

Cast

• Zachary Levi ... Chuck Bartowski
• Yvonne Strahovski ... Sarah Walker
• Joshua Gomez ... Morgan Grimes
• Sarah Lancaster ... Ellie Bartowski
• Adam Baldwin ... Major John Casey
• Wendy Makkena ... National Intelligence Director
• Tony Todd ... CIA Director Graham
• C.S. Lee ... Harry Tang
• Jim Pirri ... Father
• Dale Dye ... General Stanfield
• Matthew Bomer ... Bryce Larkin
• Ryan McPartlin ... Captain Awesome

Attachments Can Harm Your Computer. Also Your Brain.

Chuck Bartowski works as a Nerd Herd rep inside a big-box electronics store called Buy More, sorting out people's tech problems with cellphones and camcorders. His life is stalled: he's still hung up on an ex-girlfriend, and attempts by his sister, Ellie, to set him up at his birthday party are a fiasco. Ellie herself is married to a fellow doctor so impressive that Chuck refers to him as Captain Awesome.

That night Chuck gets an email that he thinks is birthday greeting from his college roommate, Bryce.

Unknown to Chuck, Bryce is now a rogue government agent, and the email actually contains an entire server of government secrets and trend analyses, which Chuck unwittingly downloads into his brain. Bryce, meanwhile, has been killed, and the server destroyed.

Both the CIA and the NSA trace the email to Chuck, and both send agents -- Sarah and John, respectively -- to recover the data. Eventually they determine that the information he downloaded no longer exists except in Chuck's mind. Meanwhile Chuck has been experiencing flashes of insight and information, and just at the point that Sarah and John are fighting over the right to haul Chuck away, Chuck has a moment of clarity: NSA and CIA info combined in his head indicate that a world leader is about to be assassinated by a bomb expert he noticed earlier in the day.

Sarah and John reluctantly work with Chuck to find and defuse a bomb with moments to spare, by downloading a virulent web virus onto the bomb's computer from a porn website. Both agents realize they need Chuck and will be forced to work with him.

Hero Track or Loser Track?

Good news for all us underachievers out there spinning our wheels, not getting the promotions, and getting laughed at by women: if you do nothing and let your life coast long enough, eventually something amazing will fall out of the sky and turn you into an actual, responsible human being with a gorgeous blonde hanging your arm and a secret life that allows you to save the world on a regular basis. Cool!

This is the lesson to be drawn from Chuck, from Josh Schwartz (creator of The O.C.), newcomer Chris Fedak, and McG. This ground has been visited before, and better, by a number of shows: Jake 2.0 immediately springs to mind, but Jake was far superior in that it delved deep into how this sudden change of life twisted Jake's head. Chuck is beautifully made (director McG is now an expert at integrating impressive, adrenaline-fueled fight scenes and stunts into comedies, and there's some fantastic stuff with Bryce early on in the Chuck pilot), but there's very little depth here. The main problem is that everything comes to Chuck: all he has to do is stand still, and the insights come to him -- as well as the attentions of the beautiful Sarah, who seems into him regardless of his utility and despite his demonstrated ineptitude with women.

And then there's the sidekick and the work environment, which are lifted straight out of The 40-Year Old Virgin and other movies in which an intelligent but underachieving protagonist is surrounded by co-worker/friends who are dumber, more vulgar, and much less self-aware than he is. Is this the only way to make a slacker sympathetic?

Where to Go From Here

I also wonder where the show is going to go with this premise of the information in Chucks' head, which was encoded into millions of stock footage images (so that when Chuck figures things out we see shots of apple pie, monkeys boxing, that sort of thing). Isn't this information almost immediately out of date the moment it's loaded into Chuck's head? How is Chuck's information going to be useful to the CIA and NSA a year from now, a month from now, a week from now? Perhaps Bryce also included an autodownloader for regular data updates and software patches.

Plot holes aside, there are a lot of plusses that may outweigh the central flaws in the long run. Zachary Levi (from Less than Perfect) is fine in the role -- he keeps his performance understated, and exudes just enough charisma to be believable as the head nerd in a coterie of losers. Yvonne Strahovski conveys the necessary mix of business and sympathy, but she looks like a model, not a CIA agent. Adam Baldwin (from Firefly) comes off as if his entire character description consisted of the word "acerbic"; I think the intent is to slot him into the Robert Culp role, but so far he's a placeholder.

Chuck had a few genuinely funny moments; my favorite was a throwaway shot when two skaters observe Chuck's Nerd Herd company car speeding backwards down several flights of cement steps and one says, "Whoa. Computer emergency." Perhaps as the show develops the comedy will be less peripheral; but the primary problem facing Chuck is that he wants to be more than a joke, but the tone and structure of the show won't let him.