Way to Go, 'Chuck'!

Way to Go, 'Chuck'!
With a Dash of Hitchcockian Intrigue, NBC Comedy Strikes a Blow for Nerds

By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
2007;

"Chuck" is Chuck-full of elements already available in wretched excess (the only kind of excess TV knows) in prime time. There's the stereotypical wacky slacker, and lots of tongue-in-cheek, high-tech derring-do, which, if you're not in a playful mood, will come off as derring-don't.

But the show, premiering tonight on NBC, also has a happily palpable likability going for it, a lot of that courtesy of Zachary Levi, who plays the unlikely and in fact unwilling hero. Chuck Bartowski is a suburban schlemiel whose passive existence as supervisor of the Nerd Herd at the local Buy More is shattered one day by a portentous piece of e-mail from Chuck's old Stanford roommate Bryce Larkin (Matthew Bomer).

Larkin is some sort of secret agent involved in rooftop chases, spectacular explosions and the like. He works in a room whose walls, floor and ceiling are all papered with changing images, like the inside of a big brain. That e-mail, sent in feverish desperation, is going to plunge poor unprepared Chuck into that same kind of world, and predictably but amusingly, he's one fish who quickly begins to miss his water, lukewarm though it may have been.

As a hapless and helpless victim of circumstance, Chuck is a distant relation to Roger Thornhill, the advertising-man hero of Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," whose life goes haywire when he's mistaken for a secret agent named George Kaplan. Producer and series creator Josh Schwartz has in fact decorated the series pilot with many a Hitchcock reference, including a rooftop chase as in "Vertigo," the prevention of a political assassination as in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and that Hitchcock favorite, the icy blonde -- in this case Yvonne Strahovski as one of the prides of the CIA.

The e-note somehow implanted a dizzy gallery of information in Chuck's head, and he finds he's being pursued and besieged with annoying and yet exhilarating frequency. This interferes with, but does not replace, such Nerd Herd duties as placating a cute little ballerina whose daddy forgot to load the camcorder with which he thought he recorded his daughter's dance recital. Obviously, that guy's in Big Trouble, too.

Details of mall life in modern America are wittily observed and make a cleverly incongruous background for Chuck's narrow escapes, mad dashes and clumsy attempts at swashbuckling. But he's no dope; if he were, he'd lose our sympathy soon enough. Behind that pocket protector, he's playful as a puppy.

To steal from the title of a great old Chuck Jones cartoon, this isn't just "Chuck" but "Chuck Amok," and if the premise and execution remind you of teen-aimed movies with similar setups and characters, at least it should remind you of the good ones, not the lame-o's. "Chuck" cheerfully brightens up NBC's Monday night of video fantastique and does it in a pretty magnifique way.