Let's start with...
Chuck
SPOILERS, obviously.
I'll start by saying that this is by far my favourite pilot so far.
Love the cast - Chuck's great, the chick is FUCKING AWESOME, Jayne's in it, the nerd friend is cool, the sister is okay, too and "Captain Awesome" has some potential (even though after rewatching the ep a couple times I must say he seems a bit over the top).
Anyway, what's the story?
The pilot starts with Chuck and his nerd friend (and co-worker - Morgan) are trying to escape. From Chuck's birthday party. With "real, live women" brought there by his sister. His sister finds them and Chuck goes to talk to them (but drives them off by talking about his ex-girlfriend). Everyone leaves and Chuck and Morgan go to Chuck's room where they find an e-mail from Chuck's old roommate "Bryce". Morgan leaves after being told to and Chuck opens the e-mail - lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures, encoded in them all the secrets that the NSA and the CIA have shared.
// Okay - he obviously doesn't know this yet and this is obviously horseshit and takes huuuuuuge amounts of suspension of disbelief. I mean - an e-mail? Tons of pictures? The e-mail, btw, was sent by Bryce after he was shot by Jayne (yeah, he's called John Casey but I'm gonna call him Jayne) after stealing said secrets. From a handheld device. Some kind of blackberry, I guess. One e-mail. Blackberry goes up in flames afterwards. I know - stupid, stupid, stupid. Huge amounts of data necessary for that but whatever. It's necessary for the set-up - Chuck has all the nation's secrets in his head.
Anyway, Morgan picks him up, they go to work (at the "Nerd Herd", they fix computers). Something about a Serbian pornstar and the spyware from her website that fucks up laptops, a dad comes in who didn't know you had to use digital tape in a digital camcorder when filming his daughter, they find a nice solution. AND THE HOT CHICK is there, too. She needs some help with her mobile phone and leaves Chuck her number before she leaves. I mean - HOT, HOT, HOT:
Anyway, Chuck has some weird experiences with sudden flashes of information (he's got all the nation's secrets - GOT IT? GOT IT?), then returns home where a ninja beats up his shit (and Chuck, for that matter). His hard drive is ruined (where the e-mail was stored - got it? all the nation's secrets on a commercial hard drive! HA!), ninja = hot girl(who, btw, is called Sarah Walker). Hot girl returns the next day to the Nerd Herd and asks Chuck out on a date. They go out, have some fun - then Jayne and his people (Jayne = NSA, Sarah = CIA) come to kill Chuck. Car pursuit, blow up some shit (actually, Jayne's car crashes rather badly but somehow it survives without so much as - well, anything). Showdown - Sarah and Jayne pointing guns at each other and Chuck. Chuck tells them that someone's going to try and kill a general with a bomb, showdown ends, they all run there (this is the flashback he had earlier), find the bomb and defuse it. (Chuck does this by browsing the serbian pornstar's website which fries the laptop controlling the bomb! Clever, ha!) Episode ends, Chuck and Sarah sit on the beach, she tries to console him "Don't tell your family and friends!", Chuck goes home, Sarah goes home - and we learn that Bryce was her boyfriend. The End.
Okay, here's why I love it:
Ignore the part about the "massive amounts of data" - why should I care? Everything else works. The actors are pretty damn good. The story is pretty clever (apparently it's a bit of a "Jake 2.0"-clone but then I've never seen "Jake 2.0" so I don't care), pretty funny - and pretty "cute" IMO. It's gonna be fun to see Chuck get the girl, Jayne's gonna be even more fun (he's just great as the bad guy), Morgan balances out this dark world of spies and killing and secrets with his nerdy humour. Yep, I love it.
Seriously - 5/5. I'm slightly worried that it might not work out so great over the long run. Where are they gonna go with this? He only has so many secrets in his head, the world moves on but - I assume - his knowledge stays the same. And it's on NBC. They usually have - IMO - the best shows but somehow fuck them up (E-Ring in 2006, Studio 60 this year). Still, can't wait for more of this.
