Pilot review: Chuck

Okay, so a secret government agency has co-opted your body and completely altered your life as you know it. Someone from their organization has gone rogue and is compromising their secrecy. You still hold some cards because they need you to help them clean up their mess.You can't really trust anyone who says they're trying to help you, but you have to pick a side to work with anyway. And the only way to keep your friends and family safe is to go home and pretend like nothing's out of the ordinary. Now, did I just describe Chuck or Bionic Woman? Turns out, it's both. Guess NBC has a strong theme this year. Regardless, here are my thoughts on Chuck:

I liked it. Funny, action-y, Captain Awesome-y. I wouldn't go so far as to say the whole epsiode was awesome, but it was good and enjoyable.

Chuck is definitely the middle class Seth Cohen 8 years later (although based on the ages of the actors, 1 year earlier). He's a "nerd" who is, in reality, really cool. Just not among his sister's snooty doctor friends. He's loveable for all the reasons Seth was loveable, but not really annoying or completely self involved the way Seth was. His friend Morgan is a moron, and pretty damn funny. His sister is the epitome of nice-n-cute-ness (and Sarah Lancaster is just really endearing). Sister's boyfriend, Captain Awesome, the name says it all. He's kind of like the post-gay-dad Luke. Nice, attractive, and dopey. But he's apparently also quite smart, based on the doctor thing.

Then there are the government people. Sarah (if that's her real name), the CIA agent, looks a lot like Olivia Wilde did while on the OC. She's undoubtedly attractive, but she's a little bland in terms of personality. Maybe she'll become less so as secrets about what's really going on are revealed, but that may be a long shot. Adam Baldwin is John Casey, the NSA agent. He's really hamming it up, but that's definitely got to be for the benefit of the broad audience, rather than a result of his acting abilities, because he can deliver bone dry sarcasm with the best of them. By far the most interesting of the government agents is Bryce Larkin, the rogue CIA agent and former college friend of Chuck who got him into all of this in the first place. Bryce is smooth, clever, has a kickass soundtrack, and is unfortunately already dead. I missed him immediately.

Other than that, apparently all of the government's secrets have a lot to do with pie. Or at least whatever was encrypted in that picture of a pie, because Chuck has to see that one a lot. I hope they don't have to do that flashy picture thing every time he's recalling a piece of information, because that's going to get tedious really fast. The exception to this is the very last recall of the episode where we find out a key piece of Sarah's past. It makes sense that we saw that one because now we know exactly what he knows without him having to say it. So I guess it's important sometimes, but it's just going to get really annoying if the show is constantly being interrupted by the same flashing pictures giving us bits of information. That's just my take.

One final note: I'm really happy that Josh Schwartz is continuing his quest to force "awesome" back into the vernacular. So far, I think it's been successful. I'm still saying "awesome" instead of saying "Mike Jones."