Chuck 2.01, “Chuck Versus the First Date”

"Don't worry; we'll pick up the check."

“What do you have to lose? In a week, you’re going to be undercover in some place like Jakarta in a knife-fight, with some evil-doer, and in that exact moment, you’re going to wish that you would’ve spent on last…night of fun with me.” 

– Chuck

“That’s the single dumbest story I’ve every heard.” – Mr. Colt

I recently watched NBC’s wonderful romantic spy comedy Chuck for the first time last November, but I wasn’t able to really get into its first season. It had a nicely goofy, high-concept premise – a likeable electronics store employee is forced into being the world’s greatest secret agent – and a strong cast led by Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, and Adam Baldwin, but the show’s actual first season execution was somewhat disappointing. This may have been a result of a smaller budget than the show needed (leading to often mediocre action sequences), or the scripts’ struggling to link the two worlds of the show: the workplace comedy at the Buy More electronics depot and the lighthearted espionage action in the greater Los Angeles area. It was not a bad show, and several episodes highlighted the show’s potential, but it was more of a fun distraction than something that could, or maybe even deserved to become a cult hit.

The next season would change that significantly.

“Chuck Versus the First Date” is not the best episode of the show, let alone a highlight in its excellent second season, but it is a fantastic avenue through which creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak (both of whom wrote this episode) were able to reintroduce their program, show off its higher budget, and express the show’s new sense of invigoration. While its need to set up the season keeps it from being a classic for the show, I appreciate for how aggressively it tackles the problems the show had and paves the way for it to turn into a far better, stronger show.

“First Date” takes place relatively soon after the last season, and wastes little time explaining the premise of the series: Chuck Bartowski (Levi), a nerdy IT support worker at a Best Buy analogue, is inadvertently brainwashed with the entire contents of a CIA/NSA database, turning him into the US government’s most dangerous assert and forcing him into a variety of spy escapades (okay, a zany high concept even for television, but that’s not a problem). Chuck (and Chuck) is thus to balance navigating the dangerous game of international espionage with his handlers, CIA femme fatale Sarah (Strahovski) and rightwing NSA thug Casey (Baldwin) and working in the political nightmare of the Buy More electronics chain with his best friend, Morgan (Joshua Gomez).

The beginning of the episode teases a massive shift in the dynamic that was never going to happen (certainly not at this time in the show’s run, anyway), but helps provide a nice energy for the outing and explain more about the characters. After the cold open’s opening sequence, in which Chuck rescues a McGuffin from guest star Michael Clarke Duncan, we learn that the object was the final part of the rebuilt Intersect computer that can replace him, and that Chuck’s constant state of danger is soon to be over. However, not only is this Cipher in danger of being stolen back, but unbeknownst to Chuck, the NSA and Casey are planning to murder him after the computer is finished. Obviously, even slightly perceptive television viewers know that Chuck isn't getting whacked, but it sets up a nice tension where Chuck’s attempts to extricate himself from a place of constant danger and lies only endangers him further.

On its own, this is a metatextual false conflict (in that it has to be resolved because of the rules of the universe outside the show), but it can be useful for how it informs us about its characters. Because we’ve been shown all through last season (although not as much in this episode) that Chuck hates the network of lies he’s forced to live in, it’s fun and useful to see him assuming that he’s escaped. By knowing more about his fate, it allows the nice scenes where Casey struggles to lie to Chuck, which is both useful for us to learn more about the characters and an entertaining way to have these characters interact (and the former’s reluctant acceptance). It is most useful, however, with Sarah. While Strahovski did good work in the first season, she suffered more than the other leads due to Sarah’s general presence in the action and dramatic spaces and much less in the comic one, which was only one particularly developed (per episodes, the dramatic stuff worked well enough, but it lacked a strong narrative through line or concrete relation to the rest of the show). Her assumption that the mission is over allows her to drop her guard slightly, gives her more to do, and, by getting a chance to interact with Chuck completely outside of the spy world, makes the romance that was at the center of the show (and would sometimes be the center) to feel less one-sided. More broadly, it also allows Sarah’s character to start to be far more dynamic than it was in the first season.

This trend extends especially to the fight scene at the end of the episode, another way in which “First Date” was able to show marked improvement over earlier episodes. The improved budget allowed for more engaging action sequences, and the Sarah/Colt fight on the roof (along with, to a much lesser extent, the cage match) is far better than the fights of the first season (one exception being the end of “Chuck Versus the Undercover Lover”, with Casey fighting Russian thugs with Chuck tied to his back), and is something of a preamble to the inspired fight scenes of the rest of the season. Later fights in the season, like Sarah’s full-contact beat down of a Triad boss inside a sports car, or Chuck’s fending off a terrorist with a malfunctioning Gravitron, managed to turn the lower budget into a blessing, focusing creating crazier fights that a more traditional action hero can’t realistically do.

The visual style was always the weakest part of Chuck, generally acceptable with occasional interesting or bizarre touches, but its crew did live up to the more interesting and dynamic action set pieces the series started to make. Some shots, like the pan through Chuck’s house after the opening credits, are much more inspired, visually engaging, and simply energetic, an absolute necessity for a show that needs a fast pace.

Colt himself, or more accurately Duncan, shows another serious improvement of the show in its use of guest stars. Booking big name actors is generally a risk for shows, as it runs the all-too common risk of having them just dominate the show (a recent and very problematic example was Will Ferrell’s stint on the Office’s seventh season, and James Spader’s in the eighth). What Chuck was able to do, with Duncan, Scott Bakula, Timothy Dalton, Linda Hamilton, Carrie-Ann Moss, and a litany of other excellent guest stars, was to direct their screen presence in a way that elevated the show. When Colt tells Chuck to stretch so that his brutal murder won’t be too painful, it’s a funny, almost bizarrely sweet moment that would not land nearly as well if the actor delivering it wasn’t as capable of, or famous for, playing characters who could be simultaneously terrifying and comforting. It allows the presence to add, rather than detract, energy to the show.

And Chuck’s defeat of Colt – exploiting Morgan’s Call of Duty strategy – is an example of the greatest, and probably most important change in the second season: the committed integration of the spy and nerd worlds. As Chuck is a show that revolves around two distinct spheres – spheres that often connect but aren’t supposed to – it essentially has A- and B-plots that split evenly (and respectively) between those two parts of Chuck’s life. The danger of this approach is that A) it runs the risk of the Buy More plots feeling useless, and B) the spy plots can feel insubstantial. Having the plots run as foils to each other is a necessary start (and it allows us to view a central theme through two different plots), but also having a narrative link is a very useful (if sometimes difficult) way to make them feel even more connected, which gives episodes weight and value.

Even a show this light-hearted with only a single foot barely in reality needs some kind of dramatic legitimacy, and having Chuck’s adventures reflect his fears and concerns – fears that also exist elsewhere within the show – allows that. It also gives Chuck value as a character beyond the Intersect, because the world of the Nerd Herd and Captain Awesome (Ryan MacPartlin, now added to the main cast with Mark Christopher Lawrence, Vik Sahay, Julia Ling, and Scott Krinsky) provides another avenue unique to him to solve the problems of the week. And while it doesn’t happen in this episode, the parallel structure allows the wonderful comedic (and dramatic) moments when characters from one world are forced into another.

It isn’t a perfect episode by any means. While I appreciate how quickly the show was able to get its premise exposition out of the way, I still found the use of Chuck’s internal monologue to be slightly clumsy, and also against one of the show’s unofficial narrative rules (the only other time in which Chuck would talk to the audience directly was in the opening for the second episode, again trying to help make the premise more easily palatable). It’s a necessary evil that shouldn’t really be necessary.

Beyond that, the thing that makes “First Date” so enjoyable to me is how confident it is, possessing an amiable and crazed energy. It isn’t just willing to have a guest star mock the show’s central premise, and in the first few minutes of the show, it’s going to then have this character exit on a zip line and invade a Chinese restaurant with some kind of emblem ring-wearing secret thug army. The gruff supporting character is not just morally ambiguous, but actively planning to kill our hero while winking at a wallet-sized photograph of Ronald Reagan (and apologizing to another, larger photo later). The B-plot turns a minor bureaucratic demand into an aerial cage match. Chuck was never going to be nearly as anarchic as 30 Rock (it was certainly not nearly as toxic to its own sponsors, and network, for one thing), and it never had Community’s experimental spirit, but its premise alone, and its logical (and probably inevitable) extrapolation of such, is audacious enough to make it a worthy member of NBC’s stable of mid-2000s cult shows.

I think that one of the reasons why the first season feel so different is that it’s more…directly parodic, I guess? It felt like more of a 90s action-comedy that saw itself as a spoof, more openly commenting on the silliness instead of lieu of having as much of it (which only works up to a point). Double downing on the goofy spy stuff, like Casey’s hallway shower and security system behind a fake security system, makes the show feel, at least to me, more legitimate because it’s treating its universe as more internally consistent.

One of the interesting things about Chuck is that, fundamentally, it is a show that has to keep itself constantly balanced in the middle of a three-part Venn diagram. With a couple of exceptions (and even those have some tacit inclusion), every story has to simultaneously be a workplace comedy the Buy More, an action series with its silly but pleasing spy hijinks, and a sweet, soap operatic romance between Chuck and Sarah. With a few exceptions (I was going to reference the fourth season’s excellent, action-dominant “Chuck Versus Phase Three”, but after watching it again I realized it actually integrated all three spheres extremely well), the show’s best episodes were the ones that would mix all three tones, and I think that the reason for the cult fan base that surrounded it during its run is more than a little due to that. With the comedy, the action scenes have levity and character, Chuck’s home life gives stakes to escapades that would otherwise be lacking in them, and the frequent peril of the job gives the romance a fun wrinkle.

In an era of violent, gritty antihero shows, incredibly pretentious prestige dramas, and dark examinations of society (and make no mistake, all three of those have given us great television), there’s something incredibly comforting to me about a fun, silly show that was happy with its B-list status. I really don’t think that Chuck’s suggestion for why Sarah go out with him was meant to be metatextual, but if the episode was meant to attract an audience (and as a premiere, it almost definitely was), the idea that something fun might be more valid than something serious would be its thesis statement. Chuck had a little while to go before it would really become the show it needed to be, but “First Date” makes substantial steps to that goal.

Lingering concerns:

• While writing about the tonal shift in the show, I realized that it makes a great sister show to Community. Both shows are very self-aware, pop culture-soaked genre shows that try (and often succeed) to both comment on their tropes while still embodying them with abandon, but while Chuck largely stays within a specific (albeit unique) sphere, Community goes from a much more traditional space and oscillates widely with its experimentation.
• “Well like the sign says, ‘Yogurt & Fun’”. Outside of a brief mention, the Castle base underneath the Buy More is totally absent. It’s kind of surprising that the writers aren’t showing us their nice new space to play in, especially considering how much time we’d spend down there, but the episode was fairly stuffed as it is.
• On that topic, the Weinerlicious is now gone, probably the only case of the show toning down its craziness in this episode. It was one of the first season’s ways of combining disparate tones, in this case sexy German wench outfits with what is, even considering the phallic shape, probably the least erotic food on the planet.
• Also removed, albeit with far more ceremony: Tony Todd’s CIA director Graham. As much as I love Todd, the show never capitalized on either his potential for insanity or the CIA-NSA tension used to justify having two distant bureaucratic officers. His death also led to Bonita Friedericy’s General Beckman to go from an almost afterthought of a character to a consistently strong part of the ensemble.
• I talked about the importance of the parallel structure to the show earlier; one of Chuck’s more common ways of accomplishing that, particularly in the second and third seasons, was to have the Buy More employees engage in spy shenanigans of their own. It isn’t as prominent here, but Morgan’s fear of his Call of Duty plan being seen by their Large Mart rivals is a way to reference how the object of value (specifically, the cipher) remain a concern.
• One of the ways in which the episode feels more structurally sound is in its use of running gags. While his repeated montages set to a diegetic Huey Lewis and the News is probably the strongest (along with Casey “catching [him]” when he fell), I also liked Chuck’s insistence on Sarah not taking her gun – and their mutual and inevitable indignation after she actually needed it on the date.
• “One of them will be the new assistant manager, and one of them…will be Jeff!” While Morgan would not get to his comic heights for some time, and the Buy More plots would get further integrated into the spy plots later, this kind of goofy story is useful for giving the episode some further kinetic energy. Chuck’s tone demands a level of energy necessary for the show to work, and the assistant manager plotline is a nice way to add some weird comedy bits (like Jeff’s hideous resume) in between the fights.
• The Chinese restaurant is named “the Last Dragon”, an homage to the wonderful Blaxpolitation/martial arts/musical and a personal favorite that will almost certainly be reviewed here at some point in the future.
• Finally, Jeff’s resume, presented without comment: “I’ve worked here. Forever…18 years and know where all the bodies are buried. Ha ha ha. My co-workers have nice feet. I like to take picture [sic] of them. And then [something] them. Chuck, Anna, Morgan.”

Next time: Joffery Baratheon starts up his plan to give King’s Landing the Caligula treatment in Game of Thrones’ “the North Remembers.”