TV is the New Reading

‘Chuck’ a standout

among fall premieres

How much do I love this show?

The opening sequence of title character Chuck, played by Zachary Levi, trying to escape his own birthday party is just fun. He’s socially awkward, sort of in charge of his own life (not completely, of course, because then there wouldn’t be the scrambling about). But his sister, who he’s living with, drags him back downstairs and foists his company on her friends.

Chuck, you see, is a tech-support guru for the “Nerd Herd” at a Buy More (which is of course completely different and in no way supports any comparison with Best Buy’s “Geek Squad”) along with his best friend, Morgan, played by Chris Fedak. Chuck’s good at his job but aspires to an assistant manager position, thwarted at every turn by oh who cares.

His crippling social awkwardness at the birthday party was intercut beautifully with scenes of his college roommate, Bryce, now a rogue agent (or is he?) stealing a mass of super-secret data encoded in a zillion images ranging from the bizarre to the mundane – which, side note, has to be one of the most intractible and unreliable means we have of storing, transmitting and manipulating information with the possible exception of interpretive dance.

This super-secret data is, we are told, the means by which the CIA and FBI and National Security Administration share information. Agents would apparently watch the information and then they would know all sorts of things like the movements of heads of state and military leaders and foreign spies and so forth.

Bryce downloaded the information to a supercomputer the size of a cellphone and made a mad dash to escape the facility it was stored in, eluding armored agents via some visually exciting parkour through the offices. He doesn’t make it, but before he dies, he sends the images to Chuck, who opens the e-mail and just ... absorbs the hours of information that comes spewing out.

This is the part of the show I’m trying not to think about too much. All that visual information takes up a huge amount of space. It wouldn’t transmit instantaneously no matter how cool a spy you are. It would also get stored on potentially several servers on its way from sender to receiver, and the government agents dispatched to pursue the information would know this.

But it was hard to tell exactly what their objectives were in pursuing this information in the first place. If this is the means by which the CIA and NSA are sharing information, then they’ve already got it. So they’re looking to ... arrest the person who received it? Eliminate him? Get him ... fired? I’m not entirely clear.

One of the agents deployed is the CIA’s Sarah Walker, played by the beautiful Yvonne Strzechowski. The other is the NSA’s John Casey, played by ... Adam Baldwin.

Oh dear.

You might not remember Baldwin from his appearances as mercenary Jayne Cobb on FOX’s “Firefly,” ne’er-do-well liaison to dark forces Marcus Hamilton on the WB’s “Angel” and special agent Danny Love on FOX’s “The Inside.” And he was apparently on ABC's "Day Break" as well. Oy.

I ... really hope it’s a coincidence that all of these shows vanished within a season of his signing on. Maybe NBC can help turn the trend around.

In any event, the show is cool with lots of compelling visuals and goofily comic characters – along with a mid-level tech-support guy carrying the sum total of America’s national security between his ears. “Chuck” is ultimately quirky, relatable and down-to-the-floor watchable, and I for one look forward to seeing where they go from here.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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