Chuck (original) (raw)

Chuck
Genre: Comedy, Action
Popular Pairings: Casey/Chuck, Bryce/Chuck, other various
Series Length: 13, ongoing (as of 2/3/08)
Episodes Watched: 2 (Yeah, I is teh lame.)

Plot: After opening an email from an old college schoolmate, the loser computer geek/employee at the local quasi-Best Buy store has government secrets downloaded into his brain. Now, he has agents from the CIA and NSA hanging around him with the hopes of protecting him/gleaning important information/figuring out a way to get the secrets out.

Verdict: Show is watchable but not particularly clever. Types of relationships the males in the show have seem like they can lead to slash (jealous schoolmates, annoyed protector), but actual interactions don't really have any chemistry, much less of the homoerotic sort.

Links of Interest:
Chuck Slash LJ Com

Comments:
Forgive my possibly wrong impressions, as I only watched two episodes. The show in general is pretty decent but nothing special. I've kind of a soft spot for the loser-hero type main, but I'm also rather easily tired out by how often shows and movies tend to rely on the trope to entirely make and define their character. Even when a story does do that, it can still be pretty decent if the writing is funny and clever enough, but here it isn't really. Also, I think for me a successful loser main character needs to be semi-proud of their status. If they don't like who they are and have higher ambitions that they just haven't been able to fulfill, then it's very hard to make the character not come off as too pathetic.

For a pure escapist comedy/action show, though, that's ok if you're just trying to make a watchable show. But I don't think it's very good for slashability. The main possibly slash pairings seem to be Chuck/Casey, the NSA agent sent to protect/intimidate information out of him, and Chuck/Bryce, the old schoolmate who actually dies (I thought? But a glance at the LJ com makes it seem so prevalent I wonder.) in the opening scene, but whom Chuck has a sort of antagonistic attitude towards, as well as probably an inferiority complex. The Bryce/Chuck thing I can kind of relate to, as it's suggested he's always been kind of preoccupied with Bryce (I believe Bryce also stole his old girlfriend and got him kicked out of school), and in a slash fan's heart, any sort of preoccupation one male has for another = They wanna SMEX. The fact that Bryce sent Chuck the email perhaps Bryce had some sort of preoccupation with Chuck as well. Still, I'm the sort that has to see actual character interaction and chemistry for it to work for me.

Casey/Chuck on the other hand... I guess makes sense as he's protecting him, but he acts rather like a pompous robot protecting an idiotic human. The whole blindly acting like you think less of someone than they really deserve thing can be good for slashing, too (suggests they are perhaps overcompensating because someone is embarrassed about their true feelings, etc), but to bet back to Chuck again, frankly he's just as much an idiot as Casey treats him as, even if he could stand to be a little more polite about it.

In the end, the only characters I saw as really having any sort of sexual tension were Casey and the CIA agent who is rather competitive with him. At times they fight, sometimes physically, at times there's a lot of mistrust flying around, and at other times they find themselves working together. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the CIA agent is female (and I think supposed to be the love interest of Chuck anyway, though the pairing makes only slightly more sense to me than the Casey/Chuck one, with how smart and talented she supposedly is and how not-so-much is he). We're not really missing out on much, though, as even these non-pathetic characters aren't horribly interesting. Looking back on comedies I've watched without looking for slash, though, leads me to believe that's just the nature of characters made for pure comedies. A little shallow, hopefully affable. If you're just watching for comedy, it can work, but it just doesn't work for me if I'm looking for slash. Maybe I should just keep clear of them for this sort of thing. T_T