The complete first season of 'Chuck' comes to Blu-Ray and while I'm a self-anointed film snob, I actually found quite a bit to like in this comparatively well-written comedy/action offering which, while not a breakout hit, did well enough to get picked up for a second season.
Television, particularly of the hour-long story-bound set like 'E.R.' or 'Lost', has never really drawn me in. I can recognize some fine writing and scenario's playing out but I can never quite get over the fact that even good TV is like being the smartest kid on the short bus. Every so often you're entertained, but there's so much filler that my interest begins to wane.
Surprisingly, I was drawn into 'Chuck's admittedly far-fetched and goofy universe and was curious how the fates of some of these characters would turn out. And it actually kind of helped that this first season was only a short 13 episode arc due to the writers strike as those 20+ episode seasons came be sometimes daunting to get through.
The show revolves around the titular Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), a mid-to-late twenties retail drone whiling away his days as part of the 'Buy More', 'Nerd Herd' team (an obvious take on Best Buy's Geek Squad) whom stand center store and fix all sorts of technical issues for the customers.
His goofball, comic-relief friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez) also works with him and their type of nerds that head directly home after work to play the latest role-playing game.
Chuck lives with his doc sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster) and her boyfriend doc Captain Awesome (Ryan McPartlin) in Echo Park, LA and life pretty much seems to be a continuous lateral move. That is until he receives an e-mail from Bryce - his infamous former best friend at Stanford who stole his girlfriend and got him kicked out of Stanford - who is now a rogue CIA spy and was dumping a massive amount of federal secrets before he gets killed.
This information somehow gets uploaded into Chuck's brain and with all other sources of this information destroyed; Chuck is the only source of this life-and-death info. Chuck is of course tracked down by the CIA and gets two agents assigned to keep him safe until something can be figured out.
The two agents are the humorless, all-business John Casey (Adam Baldwin) and the cute blonde Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski). Sarah Walker poses as his girlfriend and takes a job at the 'Wienerlicous' hot dog eatery across from the 'Buy More' while Casey moves into an apartment across from Chuck and scores a job at 'Buy More'.
As Chuck can't access all that information at will (it has to be a visual trigger) the episodes usually center around Chuck getting a visual trigger of a certain criminal and being dragged along on the missions with Walker and Casey.
The show does a good job of offering up a nice mixture of retail and geek humor, genuine rapport between all the leads and competent spy/action thrills (granted the action here won't exactly make you throw away your Bourne pics...).
Chuck, of course, becomes enchanted with Walker. She slowly becomes fond of Chuck herself, but doesn’t want to jeopardize her mission. This Jim/Pam 'Office'-like relationship is the show's emotional centerpiece with all supporting characters getting some nice subplot rapport i.e. Chuck and Morgan's nerdy, best friend's forever relationship, Morgan's ongoing, futile crush on Chuck's sister Ellie, and Casey's borderline psychotic urge to not become close to anybody.
The 'Buy Store' is filled with eccentric, funny characters - a sort of lightweight '40 year old Virgin' vibe was obviously what they were trying for here and Ellie's boyfriend Captain Awesome is also a consistent form of entertainment from his predilection towards using the word 'Awesome' no matter the context (hence the name) and his good-natured acceptance of almost everybody around him.
The cast, filled with old pros like Adam Baldwin and Tony Todd and newcomers like Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski, are all perfect for the roles and have great chemistry.
The show's not perfect, of course; the writing can be clunky and the action is almost always poorly edited and choreographed. I think what drives the show is the ensemble cast and the comedy and most of the time, those elements worked well for me.
The show is presented with a 1.78:1 VC1 1080p encode and the results are fairly underwhelming. This is the first television show I've watched on Blu so I'm not sure if all the digital noise and grain is consistent with other television product, but seeing this amount of grain on a new production was pretty distracting.
Detail and color was quite good, however, so I suppose it's a toss-up. A DD 5.1 track is provided and does an acceptable job.
Special Features include ten deleted scenes, a 'Chuck on Chuck' 30-minute featurette which has stars Zachary Levi and Joshua Gomez sit down with creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak and talk about their favorites scenes. 'Chuck vs. The Chuckles' is a gag reel, 'Chuck's World' looks at the casting and 'Chuck's Online World' provides some short video segments from the show's website.
I had a lot of fun with this show and while I'm not clamoring to tune into the second season, I think I'll definitely try and check it out on Blu. The great cast and comedy writing make it perfect for that 18-35 demo so if you stayed away from this one due to goofier than the show really is TV ads, I would definitely recommend checking this out despite some underwhelming high-def visuals.
Chuck - The Complete First Season [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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