100 Favorite Shows: #48 — Chuck
“I thought I lost you, buddy. But you were out saving the world?”
Chuck was the little show that persisted. Critically underrated and perpetually underwatched, Chuck relied on fans (along with creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak), who fought after every season of NBC’s 2007–2012 spy comedy for the network to renew the show. The immediate cult following surrounding Chuck definitely helped (as well as sponsorship from Subway), but the series was also buoyed by a strong, accessible premise. Chuck centered around Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), an average, pure-hearted tech assistant at a Burbank Buy Moore, who stumbles upon an email from the CIA that uploads the Intersect (a program for comprehensive government knowledge) into his brain. From there, Chuck was guided by agents Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) and John Casey (Adam Baldwin) into 91 episodes of spy thrills and tons of fun at the computer store.
(Warning: this essay contains spoilers for Chuck and Full House that will upload directly to your brain.)
Is there room in today’s television landscape for a series like Chuck? The NBC series balanced Psych-type crime-solving-with-a-twist motifs (General Beckman (Bonita Friedericy) gives Chuck stakes much in the same way that Kirsten Nelson’s Chief Vick did on Psych) with Elf-esque workplace comedy moments (Chuck’s about as useful at the Buy More as Buddy is at Gimble’s — whenever he wants to be). It thrust the “boy next door” persona of Chuck Bartowski into a near-impossible scenario that demanded he keep spy secrets from his treasured family members and closest friends (eventually, through the Bartowski father (Scott Bakula), familial lore became a vital piece of the Intersect puzzle). It established a mission-of-the-week mentality (“Chuck Versus ___” set the episode title template) that aligned the series with classic spy stories, albeit with a fun, modernized twist. It grew in season two, mining Christmas, musical, and suburban premises to prove that Chuck was everything a pulp genre show could be on network television. Yet, it’s hard to see room for it in today’s landscape.
Chuck wasn’t dramatic enough to be considered a part of “prestige television,” but it wasn’t accessible enough to exist beyond a cult status. In a television world that seems split between Emmy-designed streaming series and mass-produced Chicago procedurals, something as delightful and charming as Chuck would struggle to find an audience today, even more than it did from the late 2000s to the early 2010s. Chuck is a representation of an era of network television we don’t have anymore and while I wish there was still room to just have fun now and again, I’m grateful we managed to convince NBC to give five seasons to a series that probably wouldn’t have made it past the pilot stage anywhere else.
Before Chuck ever had the Intersect uploaded to his brain, he had a breadth of knowledge of all things geek and nerd culture. The man was a walking Comic-Con before he became a walking government super-asset. A computer whiz who adored Martian Manhunter comic books, Chuck was a representation of the kind of modern nerd with an encyclopedic knowledge for his biggest interests and an unwavering commitment to his most prominent passions. We’re all nerds about something. It just so happens that Chuck’s knowledge pre-Intersect consisted of computer repair and cheesy 80s sci-fi movies. His greatest fantasy of kicking down bad guys across the world was, initially, something he only projected onto his comic books and escapist films. When the Intersect expanded his knowledge to contain the sum total of global governmental intelligence, it was like Chuck’s pipe fantasy actually came to be. How about that?
Quickly, though, a major part of Chuck’s arc is clearly established. It’s imperative for Chuck to understand that his spy fantasy was not some fun, inconsequential rite in his life. Yes, the bad guys were always a little bit more on the Stormtrooper side of incompetence, as opposed to actual international criminals. Yes, Chuck got away with speaking way too loudly in his earpieces when sneaking around the villains’ lairs. But as he implores to his best friend, Morgan (Joshua Gomez), in “Chuck Versus the Beard” (the episode when Morgan learns about Chuck’s double life), “This is not a video game! This is real life.”
For as innocuous as the show could often be, things could turn serious in an instant on Chuck. A lighthearted NBC series never really put its characters in danger, but the stakes were so far above Chuck’s abilities at times that it was hard not to feel the danger Chuck’s family and friends were in, simply by virtue of his status as a CIA asset. In the “Beard” episode, the entire cast of Chuck is involved in the plot of the episode, which revolves around an antagonistic unit posing as buyers of the Burbank Buy More franchise to infiltrate the secret CIA base underneath the electronics store.
Their story plays out against Jeff (Scott Krinsky), Lester (Vik Sahay), and Big Mike (Mark Christopher Lawrence) orchestrating a Vietnam-type protest (Lester performs “Fortunate Son”) against the threat of their job security. (They have their own bit of escapist fantasies when their revolt winds up evoking the imagery of Iwojima.) That’s the fun side of “Chuck Versus the Beard.” On the other side of matters, Chuck’s sister, Ellie (Sarah Lancaster), and brother-in-law, Awesome (Ryan McPartlin), were used as pawns to lure the Burbank unit away from their base. All characters revolve around the same story line (which was always fun, especially when Jeff and Lester short the Buy More’s power to free Chuck and Sarah while simultaneously emasculating hostile interim manager Emmett (Tony Hale) in “Chuck Versus the Colonel”), but Ellie and Awesome don’t handle it as well as Jeff and Lester. Their lives were used as chess pieces in CIA affairs. No matter how many boyhood fantasies of international spying are satisfied for Chuck, they’re not worth the perpetual risk of criminals attempting hits on his family’s lives.
The most consistently engaging aspect of Chuck was always how the series considered the real, human stakes behind each spy mission. In the early days of the show, many stories were built around the friendship between Chuck and Morgan. For Chuck, living out the dream of being a spy isn’t half as fun as being able to share in the experience with the childhood best friend who used to act out the fantasies with him while playing together. The secrecy is made even more challenging whenever Chuck has to deliberately “betray” Morgan as a way to protect him, but remain unable to explain why.
“Chuck Versus the Best Friend,” from season two, is the most apt distillation of this sentiment. Following Morgan and Anna (Julia Ling) breaking up, Chuck flashes (Intersect lingo) on her new boyfriend, Jason (Jack Yang). A massive criminal threat, Jason ends up the target of Chuck’s latest mission: befriending him. However, what’s good for the country is worse for Chuck’s friendship with Morgan. The real stakes of the episode are not in whatever heinous acts Jason is contributing to, but rather in Morgan’s perception that Chuck has betrayed his loyalty by cozying up to Jason and then outing Morgan as a stalker to save him from being tortured by Jason’s superiors.
For Morgan, his early arcs revolve around a fraught love life (which he brings on himself) and a disinterest in Buy More promotions. Mostly, what Morgan cares about is Chuck and Chuck’s friendship and any affront to that is a wound inflicted deeper upon Morgan than anything Jason could’ve done to him. Because Chuck can’t explain his actions, Morgan can’t see that his friend is acting with the utmost loyalty, doing whatever he can to protect their bond, but putting Morgan’s life above it.
After feeling like Morgan is prepared to cut Chuck out of his life forever, Chuck confronts Sarah for not doing more to help protect his friendship. He tells her a story of Morgan becoming his family in place of his absent parents (they’d eat cherry cheesecake and play The Legend of Zelda together) and cuts Sarah where it hurts by venting that she doesn’t know what it’s like to have a best friend so close that he’s family. She counters with the perfectly fair point that Chuck’s involvement with the CIA means that if he’s not operating at his best, then many other people’s best friends could be endangered. Ultimately, the best way forward is somewhere in the middle of these arguments. It’s all about balance because, as we understand from this episode, partnership (in all its forms) “is trust.” Chuck feels like “the weight of the world” is on his shoulders because, oftentimes, it is. He wants his biggest concern to be Morgan’s loyalty, but sometimes it just can’t be. Accepting this in tandem with Sarah skirting her mission slightly to persuade Anna to get back together with Morgan (an act which Casey views as an “infomercial”) shows that there is room for bits of humanity in world-changing spy work.
That’s ultimately what Chuck’s legacy is for the team: he brings a massive, beating heart to the cold calculations of spy logic. As unwitting as Chuck is (he can’t control his flashes of spy intelligence or high-caliber abilities), he never betrays his own personality. Granted, this results in major annoyance for Casey (“Bartowski, you’re like the poster child for friendly fire,” he warns), but it also results in warm affection and entertainment for Sarah, who appreciates the newness of emotion Chuck brings to the team.
As a person throughout the show, Chuck remains largely the same guy he always was, if not a bit more confident and decisive. Instead, the series largely tracks the character arc of Sarah, who transitions from a spy who felt like there was no one in her life who cared about her to a spy who has a relationship with every member of the core cast, especially Chuck’s closest confidantes. At the end of “Chuck Versus the Best Friend,” all relationships have been mended. Morgan and Anna are back together, Chuck and Morgan are on speaking terms again. But the best moment comes when Chuck ignores Sarah’s apology for acting callous towards Morgan and tells her that she has someone in her life who cares about her just as much as he cares for Morgan. And he squeezes her hand a little tighter.
“One mission at a time,” she tells Chuck in season two’s penultimate installment after essentially committing treason for the well-being of Chuck and his family in “Chuck Versus the First Kill.” A spy lifer, it seemed initially unthinkable that Sarah would choose emotion over reason, but that’s exactly what she does when she spends the entirety of “Chuck Versus the Colonel” on the run with the man she never expected to fall in love with. (Strahovski completely sells the performance, making us fully believe that a woman who could inventively turn a vehicle’s features (seat belt, horn, airbag) into weapons for combat also maintained the capacity of a romantic lead.)
Part of her decision was to help Chuck live a normal life beyond the menagerie of spy buzzwords like Fulcrum, Orion, and an army of Intersect-infused soldiers gathered together by Ted Roark (Chevy Chase), the nemesis of Stephen Bartowski. The other part is that she’s been swept away by the overflowing honest humanity within Chuck (their shared motel bed results in an interrupted spooning session as morning light streams into the room), which is so far removed from the typical qualities of people she’s known in her life. Like, for example, her partner, Casey.
The stakes of the episode are initially presented as Chuck and Sarah on the run in the name of Chuck’s father and Casey in pursuit of apprehending them as traitors to the U.S. government. Casey is an obsessive patriot who obeys tradition above all else (he has a picture of Ronald Reagan in his secret locker at the Buy More, after all), but even though General Beckman promises him a promotion to Colonel if he brings in Chuck and Sarah, we know Casey well enough to predict his decision.
Just like he did for Sarah, Chuck has broken down the emotional barriers of Casey and changed him for the better. Casey initially follows orders, but decides differently when he realizes it’s more important to keep his word to Chuck, his friend, than to General Beckman. (Even his gritted “I hate this whole family” when his surveillance cameras spot Awesome sleuthing around his apartment comes from a place of relucant love.) Casey’s heart is just too big — Chuck unlocked that.
By the end of the series, Casey is wearing a cute apron and scrubbing the floor of Morgan’s taquito residue, an act that would have been unthinkable before Chuck entered into his life. The Spy More lead absolutely changed them (for the better) when he entered into the spy world and refused to sacrifice his emotions to fit in better. Over the course of the show, Chuck didn’t really change all that much. The world perceived him to be a “loser” before the Intersect, but his heroics and sacrifices as a spy were always a part of him. The Intersect just expanded the goodness already within Chuck, kind of like Steve Rogers taking the supersoldier serum in Captain America: The First Avenger.
For Chuck, the hard part is how the Intersect’s occasional wonkiness prohibits him from fitting into either of his worlds. A Stanford graduate at Buy More versus a non-flashing spy in the CIA presents him with no option, aside from isolation. Theoretically, a machine like the Intersect would be infallible, but it’s Chuck’s open-hearted emotionality that transcends it. In “Chuck Versus the Beard,” when Agent Shaw (Brandon Routh, thriving at portraying the interpersonal muck-up to the team) benches “Agent Carmichael” for his inability to flash, it takes an emotional breakthrough for Chuck to jostle free of his funk.
The near death of Ellie, compounded with his feelings for Sarah and the sensation that he lost Morgan as a best friend, results in Chuck being unable to flash. But when he’s allowed to finally reveal the truth to Morgan, earning his trust back and opening up about his love for Sarah in good measure, the amygdala in Chuck’s brain finally stops holding back the Intersect and he performs admirably once again. By stripping Chuck of the Intersect (frequently), the series was able to test his mettle as a man, removed from the enhancing machine.
Chuck didn’t need the Intersect to understand a signal from his father that no other spy would pick up on, for example. After steering past a drive-in theater advertising a midnight showing of Tron (in a moment of nerd representation that was genuinely reverential, rather than mocking), Chuck immediately recognizes the absurdity of such a promotion and recognizes it to be the location of his father. Neither Sarah nor Casey would have been able to identify a clue like that because they’re old-fashioned when it comes to “thinking like a spy.” Sometimes, they needed to think like Chuck, whether that was in reference to a Jeff Bridges video game movie from Disney or in reference to saving a friend, rather than sacrificing that friend for “the greater good.” Chuck always knew that the greater good was in helping and protecting loved ones, from the beginning of his spy transformation with social awkwardness and Jim Halpert-type hair to the end when he had the beautiful voice of a Disney prince and the sculpted frame of a DC superhero.
The writers of Chuck excelled at snowglobe-ing the series’ status quo while still managing to stay true to who the characters were. When Chuck loses the Intersect at the end of season two, for example, Morgan also loses his job as the “glue” of the Buy More. Both of them are dreaming bigger, as Chuck sees a happy life as more important than a “cool” one and Morgan sees a happy life as being a Benihana chef in Hawaii, rather than an assistant manager in Burbank. For the most part, the stakes would be reset to keep the characters on Chuck in one another’s orbit, but it was always a thrill to see bold flexes like the end of season two, mostly because each season finale of Chuck was written like it might have been the series finale.
Chuck had a lot of series finales over the years, but its genuine one was “Chuck Versus the Goodbye” at the end of season five. This finale went the same way the Full House finale did, by giving Sarah (like Michelle) amnesia. The early installments of season five establish Chuck and Sarah’s post-spy life in a home with a red door and a white picket fence where they can be happy and raise a normal family. Such concepts don’t come easy on Chuck, though, and Sarah is eventually a blank slate of memory manipulated by the series’ final bad guy, Quinn (Angus Macfadyen).
At first, Sarah is treated as an antagonist against Chuck, Casey, Morgan, and the rest of the show’s cast of characters. (She even holds Ellie, the sweetest, most-open-to-giving-advice character on the show, at gunpoint.) Everyone besides Morgan tries to convince Chuck to let go of Sarah because they say the real Sarah is “gone.” They’re pretty quickly defeatist (Chuck asks Ellie what she would do if Awesome was in Sarah’s position instead), but Chuck never gives up on restoring Sarah’s memories. Over the course of the penultimate episode, “Chuck Versus Sarah,” Sarah’s defenses are slowly broken down by the genuine love Chuck shows her (she’s endlessly conflicted over whether to listen to her head or her heart), especially when she fights him in hand-to-hand combat, but he refuses to fight back (another parallel to Steve Rogers, who refused to attack a brainwashed Bucky Barnes).
The ultimate persuasion comes when Quinn eventually confesses to manipulating Sarah, once he gets his hands on the last copy of the Intersect, but it’s still not enough to team them up together against Quinn. She also wants to get revenge on Quinn, but she doesn’t remember a single feeling of affection or love for Chuck, so she decides to pursue justice on her own.
Ultimately, their paths converge again when Quinn plants a bomb under General Beckman’s chair at a classical concert and, when Chuck and Sarah confront him for the final time, they’re made to choose between saving the lives of everyone in the concert hall or protecting the Intersect’s final upload for the purpose of restoring Sarah Walker to normal. By this point, their choice is obvious. They didn’t hunt and kill Quinn just to choose selfishly in the series’ final climax. For as much as Chuck wants to obliterate all the machinery of the spy life, he is forced to re-upload the Intersect to his brain to disarm the bomb. It seems like all hope is lost for Sarah’s memories to return when she suddenly suggests using the pilot episode’s porn virus, Irene DeMova, as a way to neutralize the explosive and a flicker of hope flashes across Chuck’s face.
Eventually, in an unforgettable sequence on California’s Cabrillo Beach (another sign that Sarah remembers snippets of her past on the show), Chuck tells the story of their relationship and she agrees to Morgan’s idea of “one magical kiss” to bring all of the memories flooding back. It seems like an impossible, fantastical notion, but so is the idea of the love of your life walking into a Buy More one day after you uploaded an entire government database into your brain. Emotion triumphed over logic during every episode of Chuck before. What’s to say it won’t be able to do so one last time? As The Head and the Heart (no coincidence, right?) blares, the Chuck logo slides into frame in the final moments of the series, returning us to where we began and returning Chuck and Sarah to where they belong.
It’s an incredibly moving conclusion to the show and after revisiting it, I felt just as bittersweet about it as I did back in 2012. It’s such an amazing episode of the series that it reminded me why I never wanted the show to end in the first place. Between the gorgeous final scene, the slow motion hug from John Casey, and the incredible set piece that brought Jeffster to the spotlight in “Chuck Versus the Goodbye,” I was also reminded of why I love television.
I was obsessed with this Chuck finale back in the day. I wrote a whole treatise on an old blog of mine about why the episode was a masterpiece. I even listened to Jeffster’s orchestral rendition of “Take on Me” practically every day for a year, along with their earlier cover of “Africa.” (Really, the whole Jeffster musical refrain was a master stroke for Chuck, which could pull out all the stops for a phenomenal musical number whenever it wanted. I would still go to a Jeffster concert.) As I flicked away tears from the latest Chuck revisit, I remembered how much fun it was to spend time every week with a collection of characters I loved being around. Maybe there’s no room on NBC for Chuck anymore, but there will always be room for it in my heart. It wouldn’t have been as big a heart without Chuck anyway.
