the wonderful world of veena.

27 December 2013

tv binge-a-thon: chuck.

Early in the summer, I came home from some random errand to find my brother on the couch watching an episode of Chuck. Even though I had some episodes from an early season on my hard-drive - courtesy of said brother - I had never watched it and honestly didn't know much about it. That day, I saw a geeky, awkward-looking guy with shaggy hair bumbling his way through something or the other, and I settled in to finish the episode, with my brother providing background details along the way.

I liked what I saw, and we began a new episode as soon as the first one had finished. And that led to another, and likely another, and pretty soon we were spending most of our days speeding through the seasons [hey, it was too hot to do anything in the afternoons anyway. don't judge us too harshly].

We slowed down a bit once August hit; between visits from our nieces and getting everything ready for the brother to head off to school, things were pretty busy around these parts. But once my father and I returned from Aruba and things settled down a bit - during the weeks, at least - I decided to finish the remaining episodes to see how things wrapped up.

To put it simply, the first three seasons of the show were awesome. In the season premiere, Chuck Bartowski - played by Zachary Levi, my latest favourite - is a regular guy in charge of the Nerd Herd at the Buy More [modeled on the Geek Squad at Best Buy] and just kind of coasting through life without really trying too hard at anything. He ends up accidentally downloading a super-computer, the "Intersect", into his brain and suddenly finds himself as an asset to the CIA and NSA.

As the seasons progress, he goes on various missions with his handlers and somehow manages to bumble his way through them, often escaping at the last minute. He has to hide his secret from his sister and her fiance, whom he lives with, and his best friend, Morgan, who is a hilarious sidekick. The cast of characters, including his CIA and NSA handlers and his bumbling coworkers at the Buy More, is pretty hilarious, and they certainly keep the entertainment up on the show. I think my favourite was probably Agent John Casey; Adam Baldwin plays the hard-nosed, stuffy NSA agent with such great underhanded sarcasm, and he adds such a great dimension to the show.

In the fourth season, however, things kind of take a turn for the worse, and the show's just not the same. And the fifth season was - to put it simply - pretty terrible. It was disappointing, especially after how great the first 3 seasons were, but I obviously had to finish out the series. It was also shorter than the previous 4 seasons, yet there was a new storyline with a new villain introduced with 3 episodes to go, and it all just felt really rushed.

If you're interested in watching the series, I would say watch the first 3 seasons and then STOP. I'm serious. If the series was just those seasons, it would have been awesome. I honestly think they finished season 3 and just didn't know where to go from there, and the remaining seasons suffered.

My brother had bought the seasons on iTunes, but it also just became available to stream on Netflix, for anyone who wants to watch.

Wonder which show I should binge-watch next?
xx

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