After yesterday’s absurdly long post, today I’m sticking with brevity.

Did you know that Daylight Saving Time screws with television ratings? It’s true! Maybe!

Or at least, that’s the meme going around the internets today, and I’m inclined to believe. First, evidence: across the board last night, television ratings were down. Data stolen from TV By the Numbers, my go-to source for this sort of stuff, says that viewing numbers were down 4% in the 8pm slot and 2% in the 9pm slot, compared with numbers from a week ago. Sadly, this seems to have been particularly true for Chuck, which dropped 17%.

Second, wild conjecture: when it’s light outside for more of the day, people stay outside longer, or are more likely to go out some place, or are generally less inclined to fall into a snuggly warm stupor in front of the flickering, undemanding TV screen. The discrepancy in the 8pm and 9pm numbers might back this up a little bit, because at least where I live, 8pm is now significantly brighter than it used to be, but by 9pm, it’s fully dark. Weather certainly has some measurable impact on TV ratings, which is why summer television is so dominated by re-runs and low-budget reality projects, so it’s not too crazy to look to DST as a source for changing viewing patterns.

It’s a huge downer for Chuck fans, who have just started to hope they could be getting another season, thanks to NBC’s universally poor performance. I can only cross my fingers that the all-around drop will lessen the blow of the 17% plummet, but even still. Yeesh.

While Chuck vs. The Beard might not have been the deepest, darkest, most thought provoking or daring episode of Chuck, it was so undeniably fun that I just found myself grinning throughout the whole thing. Chuck vs. The Beard, in list form:

1)    I think it’s going to be great for the long term Chuck Bartowski character development that Morgan finally knows his secret. The pleasure and challenge of this season has been Chuck’s sudden character shift and all the resulting reverberations in his private life. In the spy world, he’s much more awesome now – he’s intelligent and skilled, and he comes with a sweet instant-Ninja feature (even if it is pretty buggy). It’s entirely reasonable that his relationships outside the spy world would begin to disintegrate now that his identity is aligned in a new way. Still, the audience misses what Chuck once was, and Sarah misses him as well. Morgan is a great way to keep Chuck grounded in both places, and his eternal adoration of Chuck’s abilities make it completely acceptable to him that Chuck would get picked by the CIA. He immediately sympathizes with how tough Chuck’s life has been these past few years, but he also frames Chuck’s life in terms of the same familiar relationship they’ve always had (which is why it’s so nice that Morgan complains about Chuck flashing on Duck Hunt).

This shot made absolutely no sense in the context of the scene. It is a Jeffster! glamor shot, plain and simple, with no explanation or apology. And it is excellent.

2)    Triumphant return of Jeffster!

3)    While the whole Buy More plot was basically a set-up for a series of silly sight gags and then Jeffster!, I do think the continuing allegiance to the Buy Moria nation state has a nice role to play in the whole tone of the show. Aside from the lovely flag tableau, my favorite moment of Buy More patriotism came from this week’s bad guys, excellently played by that one dude from The Drew Carey Show and that other guy from Reno 911. “So that’s the sound of liberty” has to be the best blurb Jeffster! could ever hope to get.

4)    As with almost any time I use a list on this blog, this list is just an excuse to post this, which I saw linked around twitter today, and which made me laugh for a very long time.

With the amazing US vs. Canada men’s hockey game, the giant inflatable beavers, and The Marriage Ref, NBC’s Olympic coverage came to a close Sunday night. Which means that on Monday, Chuck came back! As you may recall, Chuck last left its viewers in a hailstorm of shipper-fueled outrage, so returning last night felt a little bit like prepping for a commenter’s remake of The Perfect Storm.

Paulie really hates those will-they-or-won't-they-things. Just do it already!

As expected, it looks like there’s been some shipper grumbling about the episode, mostly focusing on Sarah’s growing intimacy with Shaw, but so far it hasn’t approached the Scorched Earth level of demanding a boycott. Some of that must have to do with the fact that “Chuck vs. The Fake Name” was quite a bit more thoughtful and self-referential about Chuck and Sarah’s diverging paths, even working in some pretty obvious meta-joking: “I hate those will-they-or-won’t-they things,” especially when spoken so earnestly by Paulie from The Sopranos, is a small step away from Liz Lemon turning straight to the camera and winking. There was also some comforting commentary from Big Mike and Jeffster (who are as close as Chuck gets to a Greek chorus) reminding the audience that at least some characters on this show remember that Chuck’s supposed to end up with Sarah. Despite what seems like a more permanent and meaningful bond between Sarah and Shaw, I can only imagine those little shout outs go a long way toward at least dialing back some of the shipper fury.

Best Greek chorus ever. Also, I have this sudden desire to own a Crock Pot...

More important than Big Mike’s classic onion tears cover-up, last night’s Chuck was just stronger than “Chuck vs. The Mask.” Chuck’s development fell a lot closer to that sweet spot of being both entertaining on the surface and compelling for the longer term – he was so funny and good at being a stone-cold assassin, but even without Sarah’s explication later on, it was disturbing to watch him balk only briefly before pulling out Casey’s tooth. Of course the Sopranos goons were delightful, and did a great job of selling my favorite moment from “The Fake Name,” when Chuck eavesdrops on Sarah’s real name and suddenly shifts into telling the baddies all about his fraught personal life. Scenes like that are great at selling the advantages of Chuck 2.0. He’s still himself, falling easily out of the spy role whenever Sarah’s involved, and he’s highly attuned to the absurdities around him, but he’s also much more in control of the situation, and is quickly able to convert his lapse into strategy. It also managed to keep being funny, particularly when Chuck points out that Sarah is the one who pushed him to get better in the first place, while in the context of this scene, Chuck’s job is to be a badass, heartless assassin. Episodes like this are strong arguments in favor of the riskier, more dynamic, more conflicted Chuck this season has been trying to inaugurate with somewhat uneven success.

"Shut up shut up shut up!"

I’m sure there are still plenty of infuriated fans out there, and at this point, it’s without question that Chuck and Sarah need some forward momentum. As Alan Sepinwall wisely suggests, the point at which your show actually throws in a funny “will-they-or-won’t-they” line is the point at which that plotline should probably get resolved post haste. But I can only hope that whatever else Chuck shippers find to feed the rage (SHE TOLD SHAW HER REAL NAME!! BETRAYALL!!!!!), they recognize the groundwork this episode went out of its way to establish and try to clamp down on the instinct to panic. An episode that sparkles and fizzes like “Fake Name” should be cause for pleasure, not uproar.

I was planning to write about Project Runway today, but as the internet appears to be unusually withholding in that quarter, it’ll have to wait until later. In the mean time, allow me to briefly express some further appreciation for Supernatural, which may not have the flash of Big Love or the epic complexity of Lost, but it continues to do what it does very well.

Last night’s Valentine’s themed episode was a great example of the show firing on all pistons. It began with a super creepy, gore-tastic opening scene where two cute people on a first date start to make out and then transition into actually eating each other to death. It followed that up with some humor, a guy who killed himself by using a toilet brush to cram himself full of Twinkies, the arrival of Famine (of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fame), and a brief but moving exploration of Sam and Dean’s evolving, twisted relationship.

Supernatural isn’t built to be a powerful, world-changing television show, but it’s so consistently effective at being scary, funny, and thoughtful that it’s head-and-shoulders above other, similarly lowbrow shows. Perhaps more than any other positive feature, Supernatural is just exceptionally good at balancing its conflicting story demands. The usual strain between week-to-week episodic stories and the long arc apocalypse plot is almost absent, letting minor ghost problems and the end of the world get all mixed up together, to the benefit of both plotlines. It’s also reliably fun, which is more than I can say for The Vampire Diaries.

***

A few updates on the crazy Chuck-pocalypse:

There were a lot of great things written about the whole shipper angle of the blow up, particularly this piece by Linda Holmes, and this one on Cultural Learnings. This blog also got a link on the LA Times Show Tracker blog, which was pretty cool. Most importantly, though, this interview with Chuck creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak addresses both the special relationship between Chuck and its fans, and gives Schwartz and Fedak an opportunity to mildly reassert that they are actually the ones in charge of the story. Shipping can be positive and build loyalty to a show, but a show’s plot is not a matter for popular vote.

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.

I got a little sidetracked today. I meant to wake up and write a long, fascinating piece about how great Chuck was last night and the evolving heroism of the main character etc. etc., and then I was going to read five hundred pages of David Copperfield. I got sidetracked. By fonts. What I’m saying is, in lieu of a long Chuck blog post, you get a short, absurdly serious close reading of one particular moment from last night’s episode.

Morgan Grimes: Assistant Manager

Chuck opened last night with Morgan walking into the Buy More, uncomfortable in his position as Assistant Manager and at war with his underlings. He pulls out an oven mitt to avoid being shocked by the electrified doorknob and he turns down the coffee he knows is laced with laxative, but he sits down on a chair covered with super glue. And he does it all to the tune of that classic self-righteous anthem, “Respect.”

Here’s the thing. “Respect” is universally known as an Aretha Franklin song, irrevocably tied up in feminist politics and African American civil rights, belted by ladies everywhere in reference to their jobs, their relationships, and their whole outlook on life. It’s less well known, but the original of that song was actually done by Otis Redding, written and recorded in 1965, two years before Aretha got a hold of it. It’s a great song, but Otis’s cries for “respect” sound distinctly less like an appeal for fair treatment in the eyes of the law and much more like a beleaguered man demanding that his wife stop hen-pecking. He’s not really asking for “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” he’s asking for “a little respect, when I come home.”

For the opening scene last night, Morgan walks into the Buy More to the tune of “Respect,” but he kicks it Otis style. It’s a great choice. Aretha’s version would have sounded absurd – it would have been complete auditory overkill for the situation, while also making Morgan look more foolish than necessary. The sound of Aretha’s voice coupled with the visual of Morgan Grime’s adorable oblivious face would have punctured the fiction the moment he stepped through the door. Even better, our cultural associations with Aretha’s cover now reflect back on the Otis version, which gives his “Respect” all the frustrated meaning without any of the clichéd “sock it to me”s.

The whole episode was great. That opening scene was awesome.

Last night’s episode of Chuck was a relief on several fronts. For one, they let the whole Chuck/Sarah relationship drama thing cool down a bit, which is going to be crucial if they want to continue to give that relationship meaning. What little emphasis did fall onto Chuck and Sarah was diluted through the larger issues of family involvement in the spy world, so it was nice to hear Sarah speak up for maintaining contact with the outside world. Even better, she spoke in favor of relationships not just as a part of her ongoing thing with Chuck, but out of her own interest. Sarah’s always been a reasonably well-sketched character, but she can fall into some boring character development grooves that have more to do with Chuck than with herself. It’s always good to see her work a little outside his plotline.

New improved Chuck, who is pretty badass

Aside from the downgrade in the Chuck/Sarah Emergency Alert Level, the episode was a good example of how Chuck’s new intersect powers will be working, which is to say, only some of the time, and not very conveniently. Zachary Levi has had a whole different aura these first few episodes, which I think may be related to a slightly shorter haircut and whatever extra training they’ve been putting him through to make the fight scenes look better. His neck’s a little more defined. He seems tanner. And that’s fine – it’s entirely appropriate that Chuck would seem different after some actual CIA training and a fancy new intersect. Even so, Chuck now looks a lot more like the real spy he’s trying to become, so it looks slightly incongruous when he falls down on the job. He’s got to go all the way to ridiculous kung-fu hand gestures before we realize the intersect’s not going to kick in, and that tension is interesting and suspenseful. Before intersect 2.0, Chuck was incompetent and you just waited for Sarah and Casey to come busting in and save him. Now, you’re not sure what to expect, and his failures are more frustrating and emotionally meaningful.

Captain Awesome and Lester as Tyler Durden

This episode also made several moves toward minor character development, as well as introduced Agent Shaw into the mix. Captain Awesome has always been one of my favorites, and in addition to being a hilariously terrible liar, also served as an important audience stand-in: his awe at Chuck’s sweet tranq gun abilities was a good reminder to the viewers of how far Chuck has come from his Nerd Herd beginnings. The whole Fight Club plotline was also fun, and while Morgan makes a fictionally fruitful and worthwhile Ass Man, the highlight for me was absolutely Lester as Tyler Durden. Something about the sunglasses and the rolled up sleeves totally sold me about that role, and I almost wanted to see some creepy liposuction soap production scenes.

Brandon Routh as mysterious, dramatically be-ringed Agent Shaw

Lastly, of course, Agent Shaw, who seems to be the catalyst for this season’s big arc forward into the Ring conspiracy and whatever else may come. I’m not sure how long Brandon Routh is contracted to be on Chuck, but at the moment, I think it’s a good idea to have some shakeup in the main team members. The ending shot of the wedding band was pretty over-the-top dramatic, but I can live with it as long as it doesn’t become a habit. Next week: Stone Cold Steve Austin! More Superman-related alumni casting! Chuck’s first solo mission!

I left NBC on a bit of a down note last week, and while the whole Leno-Conan fiasco continues to unravel (with official news from NBC that Leno’s moving out of primetime and reports surfacing Conan’s well-deserved displeasure), I can’t dismiss the ol’ Peacock out of hand. Last night, with a two-hour premiere, Chuck came back for its third season, and at least on this couch, there was joy abounding.

If you are one of the many people yet to enjoy Chuck (and there are many of you out there, according to the show’s ratings), a few words of introduction – Chuck is a goofy, funny, action-adventure spy-thriller with a hefty dose of pop culture references, a star-crossed lovers plotline, and an open-arms attitude toward product integration. Its premise is that our intelligent, unlucky everyman hero, Chuck Bartowski, has been implanted with a top-secret computer that gives him access to all CIA intel. Much to his dismay, Chuck becomes an unwilling CIA operative with a serious crush on his talented blonde CIA handler. Wackiness ensues.

The first two episodes of season three (warning – now come the spoilers) find Chuck after the implantation of a new top-secret computer which comes with built-in spy skills like kung fu and several lovely mariachi guitar numbers. Much of what has made Chuck work is its premise of a normal guy thrust into crazy spy missions and behaving accordingly, but three seasons in, there’s no longer any use pretending Chuck is going to be freaked out by a little gunfire. Especially after these first two new episodes, we know that Chuck has had some actual training, and so we expect him to be a little less of a spaz than he used to be. While this does force the show to move out of its initial character comfort-zone, Chuck has been excellent in the past about allowing its characters to grow in believable ways, and I’m looking forward to what happens when Chuck gets to act like a real spy. We saw at least some of this in these first two episodes – if nothing else, Chuck now seeks out missions rather than resents them, and his emotional maturity and selflessness in choosing to keep the intersect in his brain despite the personal sacrifice feels like a well-earned payoff for Chuck’s original good natured but clumsy character. Plus, we got a lot of all the side characters that make the show awesome. Jeff and Lester are creepy as always, Morgan as usual comes within a split second of sudden death and walks away cheerfully unaware, and Casey has a grand old time with his mini-gun.

Gotta love that classic zipline maneuver

My frustration with these first two episodes came in the moments when Chuck was held back from that kind of growth, which largely came out of the romantic bits with his handler Sarah. It’s frustrating to watch Chuck ignore a major spy crisis because he’s so intent on explaining to Sarah why he didn’t run away with her. She’s a little busy crawling through inevitable ventilation ducts to turn off the deadly gas, you idiot! Can this very special episode of Dr. Phil wait until you’re no longer trapped in a villain’s vault with a top-secret weapon?

Sarah crawls through the inevitable ventilation ducts while Chuck chooses a terrible moment to talk about his feelings

Despite the silliness of that entire scene, though, I’ve got to hand it to the writers. Chuck is as much about the Chuck-Sarah relationship as it is about spy nonsense, and they absolutely had to give us some explanation and starting point for this season’s development for those two characters. They could have dragged it out forever and waited until five episodes from now for us to realize that Chuck left Sarah not because he wanted to be a hero, because he felt an obligation to humanity. It would have been a super sappy, drippy, drawn-out revelation, and it would have been obnoxious. Instead, that whole process was crammed into two introductory episodes and cut down to its emotional bare bones, so that we can feel that discovery and now move forward with the new season.

Thankfully, we already have an opportunity to do that with another new episode tonight! Hooray for Chuck 2.0!

• Halloween is this weekend! There will be many Halloween themed episodes on TV tonight, including Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, The Mentalist, FlashForward (okay, not positive the episode actually has any Halloween in it, but the title is “Scary Monsters and Super Creeps” – that totally counts!), and of course, The Vampire Diaries. If you’re into that sort of thing. (I could include Supernatural, but every week is Halloween on that show.)

• Although most of the themed programming will be on tonight, Monday night’s episode of Castle took advantage of the holiday as well as Nathan Fillion’s rabid Firefly fan base by dressing him up as Captain Mal Reynolds for the show’s opening. The scene was riddled with ridiculous call-outs – “What are you supposed to be?” “Space cowboy!” (cue Firefly banjo twang) and also “Didn’t you used to wear that, like, five years ago?” Firefly fans everywhere lost their minds with excitement. And also wept, because, you know…they’re Firefly fans.

Space cowboy, complete with suspenders and period firearm

• There will also be Halloween themed episodes of Ghost Whisperer and Medium on Friday night. I don’t really care, and you probably don’t either, and now’s when I’m forced to admit that I wrote this entire bullet point so that I could mention the title of Friday night’s new episode of Law and Order. “Human Flesh Search Engine.”

• In news unrelated to the holiday, NBC has ordered another six episodes of Chuck, much to my delight.

• Levis has been airing an ad for their new campaign that features what some consider to be a recording of Walt Whitman’s voice. It’s a beautiful short film, but I agree that its aesthetics are undermined when at the end you realize it’s just trying to sell you a pair of pants.

I am a nerd. I am a big giant nerd covered in nerd sauce, with a light dusting of nerd flakes on top and a side of nerdy fries. Over time, this character trait has come to manifest itself in some very specific and seemingly unlikely ways, largely through a love of spaceships, aliens, time travel, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Neil Gaiman that manages to coexist with my simultaneous distaste for, say, math and physics. My parents undoubtedly knew about my affinities from a fairly early age, and were surely confirmed in their suspicions when my choice of leisure pursuit was playing with my AT-AT while wearing an oversized tshirt with a giant airbrushed snake on the front. Oh sure, I survived middle school and learned to pass as a normalish adult who speaks in reasonable, calm tones about Joss Whedon, but my nerd streak remains.

My feelings toward fictional depictions of nerds, therefore, are perhaps stronger than a critic should admit. I love the show Chuck, which I think depicts a nerd hero in a way that enables Chuck Bartowski to be both relatable and admirable. He hid his awesome secret plans on the back of his Tron poster. He is smart, friendly, and socially competent while also appreciating video games, computer systems, and the finer points of science fiction trivia. Chuck is impressive and lovable. He is also a giant nerd. So on the one hand, you’ve got a fictional nerd-hero like Chuck…

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