BIG UPS:

Nerds After Our Hearts, and Maybe Even Our Respect (ALESSANDRA STANLEY, 9/24/07, NY Times)

“Chuck,” a very funny new comedy on NBC tonight about a computer salesman inadvertently turned secret agent, could not have happened without Bill Gates and Sergey Brin. Or Steve Wozniak, Konrad Zuse, Alan Turing and any of those other smart, spindly men in glasses and short-sleeve shirts who developed the first computers and made it possible for brainy nerds to become billionaire tycoons. [...]

Chuck (Zachary Levi) leads “the nerd herd,” a team of computer technicians who work for a discount megastore called Buy More and make house calls in a red-and-white nerd-herd mobile. He’s not unattractive; he’s certainly less repulsive than his short, hairy and unctuous best friend, Morgan (Joshua Gomez). But Chuck hasn’t had a girlfriend since his college love dumped him for his handsome, athletic roommate. He spends his free time moping and playing computer games.

By the end of the first episode Chuck has stumbled on the most top secret of secrets in the national intelligence community, gone on a date with a gorgeous blond spy and defused a bomb by sending it a computer virus attached to the Web site of a Serbian porn star.

The series is part spy spoof, part workplace comedy, and it is a genuinely engaging homage to the nerd hero.

It is funny, though completely dependent on Chuck's goofy likability and his comic interplay with Morgan in particular. It's a series you can easily see running out of steam after a handful of episodes and it seems to have been named by an executive who doesn't want it to last that long.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 24, 2007 7:53 AM