The Show's called Chuck

I was really looking forward to this new show Chuck. In brief: charismatic and comical nerd gets involved with secret agent nonsense and some generic smoking hotty. I missed it on Monday night the same way I missed Heroes. What the hell was I thinking? Oh yes, I was hoping to see Emily Haines dance. I (again) was disappointed.

And! the trailer was quite promising: ninja jokes, computer jokes, Batman jokes, videogame jokes, CHiPs jokes... But I just finished my downloaded pilot and honestly, what the hell NBC?

I'm not going to say there weren't any good jokes, in fact those jokes listed above were all pretty respectable, but most were in the trailer. (When did TV shows start having trailers btw?) If you watched the trailer there's a moment where Chuck is beat-boxing "Vicky Vale!" but looks up to see the "smoking hotty" and so stops the beat-boxing and drops the phone all so suddenly--a well acted and timed physical comedy beat. The full length show also has a pretty funny follow up joke that's not included in the trailer. So there are for sure some quality moments in the show but this quality isn't all that consistent. For instance, the whole buddy aspect, which is a main element of the show, fails pretty much outright.

The buddy system is just as important in comedy as it is in... bench pressing I guess? But I mean it's a pretty standard mechanism, two characters playing off each other to generate the laughs. This particular instance has a wise cracking lead and the more-of-a-loser-than-the-lead foil. But this foil, named Morgan, is more of a loser than the lead, but he's never really funny. The jokes involving him fall flat 95% of the time. Not since Kanye and Myers have we had such dead weight in a team (Myers here being the dead weight of course).

My therapist(s) say that I need to work on being more optimistic though, so I am willing to come back to this show a few more times in hopes things will tighten up. It won't be hard for Chuck to set itself apart from the new comedies this season so I may find myself downloading it consistently out of plain boredom. Also there could be more ninja jokes. I love ninja jokes.

I don't have a clever sign off line, dammit.