Reviews: Chuck and Heroes Premier

So last night marked the beginning of tv premier week. First two up that I care about were Chuck and Heroes. Both of which I thought were, ok but disappointing. Some mild spoiling ahead, probably, so if you haven’t seen the shows and plan on it, read on at your own peril.

Chuck’s the story of Chuck, works at the Nerd Herd (a tv reality Geek Squad) and leads an all around uninteresting life. Through various mechanisms he becomes invaluable to the spook community. Hijinx. First off, apparently parkour is the new chase scene. The show basically starts out with an homage to that great parkour movie District B13 (which you should watch if you haven’t already), done reasonably well. The show itself, though, didn’t really impress me much.

Everything was pretty standard. The actors were decent if not inspired, the whacky best friend was whacky, the pretty, pretty lead female role was very pretty and the supporting guy, Adam Baldwin (of Serenity fame) played a kind of similar man of loose ethical qualities. The show was fine and entertaining, but unmemorable. I mean when will we get a show where the woman secret agent doesn’t fall in love immediately with her target? You would think that a hardened killer would maybe not fall in love immediately with her previous lovers’ old friend, especially given that her previous lover died like yesterday.

The plotting in this show was thiiiiin. I mean, you need to suspend a lot of disbelief to understand motivations and you know, physics. I mean, you need a whole infrastructure to hold all the belief up. And it ends up with a Mr. and Mrs. Smithesqueness that was so awfully predictable. In general, it doesn’t really deliver. I give it a 6, maybe 6.5. If I’m bored and it’s on, I’d probably watch it, but maybe not. I mean, it’s on against How I Met Your Mother and that stars NPH (thank Harold and Kumar for that).

Then there was Heroes. The first season, you will remember ended with a whimper, the second season begins with.. well, I don’t know. Not a bang, but not a whimper… like a cough, or maybe a sneeze. It seems to me like, after all the work of bringing all the Heroes together in Season 1 they’re all split apart again and with some new characters to boot. That sucks. Heroes has always suffered from having too many characters and too many storylines, it’s like the first episodes of a season of the Amazing Race where you spend like 5 minutes an episode with each group, getting to know their story and personality not at all. But at least at the end of last season, a lot of those storylines came together and you spent more time with fewer larger groups of Heroes.

Now they’re were all divided up again and we didn’t even get back in touch with like half the cast and I already felt tired keeping track of what the ones in this episode were doing. There’s the new lady, who seems like a rehash of the Niki Sanders plotting early on last season. And the cheerleader and the dad who are trying to lead un-extraordinary lives and both finding it very difficult to do so. Which kind of isn’t different from their plot in the first season either, where he ran a paper store and she, while a cheerleader, was trying to hide her power from everyone. And Mohinder meets yet another seemingly nerdy, inoffensive guy who turns out to work for the Company. Parkman this season has some domestic troubles with the school teacher instead of his wife. Nothing really feels fresh at all in the show, it’s so similar to the first season I wonder if it was done on purpose as some kinda fancy pants cinema studies exercise. But if it was done on purpose, it wasn’t terribly effective because it made the premier feel like I already watched it.

What it has going for it is Hiro, who is always very good. But even his storyline dragged quite a bit at the end. We all know that he’s going to save the swordsmith. Come on. Or will he actually convince the NPH wannabe to save the day? Unlikely. Did they really kill Sulu? He was totally awesome. It also has the natural momentum of a popular show, so I automatically want to see what happens to everyone. And it uses the cheap device of the death-threat pictures for Sulu and Nathan’s mom, which while an easy device still kinda works on my feeble and easily manipulated mind.

I’d give this premier a solid 7. I’ll probably watch it, although I won’t arrange my life around the show. I hope it’ll pick up and not go all Lost Season 2 on me. Or maybe I hope it does, methinks I watch to much tv.

What’d y’all think of the premiers?

Sep 25th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: review · tv