Chuck vs the Shippers

Did you watch Chuck last night? If so, did you hear a small screaming sound somewhere in the distance, a million voices crying out in pain? Yeah, that would be the internet.

Culled from twenty-seven pages of comments on the NBC boards:

Wow, I have never actually seen a show commit suicide live before.

Josh Schwartz is on my **** list. It’s like he is purposely digging a grave for this show and hosing over the Chuck fans so he can move on to other projects.

Man this show just jump the shark

Worst episode ever.

For me at least, last night’s episode of Chuck was a standard-to-meh range offering, with less pop and fizzle than you usually like to see, some character development pacing issues, and some definite plot silliness, but for the most part, it was essentially in line with the usual programming. Imagine my surprise, then, to browse through the usually quite reasonable comments on Alan Sepinwall’s blog post, and then read through the NBC website’s Chuck boards and discover that last night’s episode was actually Chuck-pocalypse. Chuck-mageddon. ChOMFG. A few die-hard Chuck fans, who went to extensive lengths less than a year ago in order to save the show from the very teetering edge of cancellation, are now demanding a Chuck boycott to tell NBC who’s boss on this show.

From a commenter on Alan Sepinwall’s blog:

When Chuck returns after the Olympics, no one should watch it on air. Rather we should all watch it online at Hulu or any other online service we can find. Failing that, DVR the show and watch it that way.

That way we can send a message to NBC and the producers of the show that we are still interested in the show but we are not prepared to settle for the caliber of show we saw last night. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore”.

What actually happened to incite this mouth-foaming rage? Chuck and Sarah, whose star-crossed, will-they-won’t-they relationship has formed a central premise for the show since its beginning, agreed to date other people. I know. Chuck’s been interested in this new girl who works at the Buy More, Hannah, and last night Sarah expressed an attraction toward the new boss, Shaw. After some poisoning/suffocation in a museum vault shenanigans, Chuck and Sarah found themselves embracing Hannah and Shaw respectively, and then had an adult conversation about exploring new relationships.

As many commenters on these boards point out, what’s happening here appears to be a fissure between the casual Chuck fans and the shippers. Fans whose enjoyment of Chuck is contingent on the success of Chuck and Sarah’s relationship (or “Charah”) cannot sit back calmly while those characters walk away from the each other. I’m fascinated by the response, because it’s both an essential part experiencing fiction serially, and it requires some significant blindness to other fictional experiences. In a long novel released all at once, there’s no opportunity for this intense animosity – you keep reading and watch everything ultimately resolve itself. In this instance, the week-to-week gap (in this case much longer thanks to the Olympics) is double-edged: on the one hand you get fans declaring a boycott and announcing themselves to be finished with the show; on the other, the space between episodes is the time when your fans whip themselves into a veritable audience-building frenzy.

The willful blindness to other fictional experiences is an intrinsic aspect of almost any shipping. At least in the case of other infamous shipped relationships – the Twilight triangle, Veronica Mars, Buffy – one character has a choice between two other characters, and fans take sides. For shows like Chuck, where Chuck and Sarah are clearly built to be together, complete obsession with their relationship requires that fans ignore any previous fictional knowledge that leads them to the obvious conclusion. Of course these new characters are minor obstacles in the longer-term relationship arc. Of course Chuck and Sarah will fall in love again. It has happened innumerable times before, on television, in novels, in comic books, in plays, operas, and radio dramas. It will happen again. I suppose Chuck or Sarah could die, or another character could join the permanent cast, but in either of those instances, you’d know what was going on. This type of minor roadblock is never the end point, but in order to continually invest yourself in Chuck and Sarah, you have to ignore any previous knowledge about how These Things work. It’s a bizarre, intriguing, and I think relatively recent breed of fandom. I can only hope very few of them carry through with the boycott idea, because regardless how angry they might be now, Chuck and Sarah fraught with problems has to be better than no Charah at all.