Chuck

I haven’t caught up with this week’s Chuck, but I did watch last week’s Charlie’s Angels tribute, “Chuck vs. the Cat Squad.” Allowing for the fact that the show has been in decline for a while and that it has never figured out how to solve any of the myriad problems it has always had (endless ‘shipping of two leads who have no chemistry, not enough for Adam Baldwin to do; insane overuse of wacky comedy background music), I kind of enjoyed it, as I usually enjoy the show’s tributes to cheesy action/spy stuff of the past. Or rather, I enjoyed it for the first few acts, and then…

Regular commenter Justin had an interesting comment on Chuck yesterday:

I don’t think the producers of Chuck have been reading my pleas for them to become more old-fashioned in their story structure, but last night’s episode, intentionally or not, was one of the episodes that brings back the idea that an hour-long drama could have a tag scene at the end. That is, the plot was satisfyingly resolved with a few minutes left to go, and the final “act” was not really an act, but just an easily-detatchable scene that contains some light comedy and ends the story on a happy, smiley tableau.

Regular commenter Anthony Strand made a great point the other week about Chuck:

I didn’t expect the season premiere of Pushing Daisies to do the kind of numbers the series premiere did, but getting beat by Knight Rider? That hurts a lot. I hope they can turn this around, though there are a limited number of things that can be done to “punch up” a Bryan Fuller series; his shows are so stylized that the options for re-tooling are very limited. (Dead Like Me already proved that; the network fired Fuller, re-tooled the show, but it still felt pretty much the same as it was when Fuller ran it, just not as good.) The producers could and very well might add some new characters to Pushing Daisies, but any new character they could add would inevitably be as twee and cute as the other characters; in Fuller’s world, there aren’t a large range of ways for characters to act.