‘Chuck’ seems wacky for the sake of wackiness

I’ve missed “Chuck” for most of this season, but based on what I saw from Friday’s episode, I’m disinclined to go back and fill in the blanks on (www.hulu.com).

The show has tried a reboot in what is meant by all accounts to be its final season.

The series began easily enough with Zachary Levi as a likeable schlub in the title role as Chuck, a brighter-than-average tech support guy at the Buy More, a big-box electronics outlet in Burbank.

He encounters a brain-boost called The Intersect which makes him an encyclopedic repository and searchable database of gathered intelligence. He essentially becomes a spy, or more to the point, an asset.

He becomes useful on missions because he can look at someone and grab a case history or mission profile of field operatives which -- with support from Sarah Walker of the CIA and John Casey of the National Security Agency -- helps bring down the bad guys and protect American lives and interests.

That’s all well and good, but he’s still Chuck. And in and among his occasional geek outs with his best friend and co-worker Morgan Grimes, played by Joshua Gomez, he starts falling for Sarah, played by Yvonne Strahovski. And she, quite despite herself, starts falling for him, and last season they overcame all the workplace tension and got married.

The show has seemed to struggle a bit to find stuff to do. Chuck has had the Intersect, he has had an enhanced installation which gave him foreign languages and martial arts skills, he has lost the Intersect entirely, and ... well, the way it works is something akin to sensory overload -- that information is coded into images which flash in his head and he accesses the information. Very useful in the field, but did he ever want to be a spy? The show explores how, between Sarah and John Casey, played by Adam Baldwin, he’s sort of drawn into the spy game. He also encounters rogue agents with the Intersect who he determines aren’t using it as well as he is.

And then there’s ongoing sideplots involving his sister and brother-in-law. Part of how they were working together was when their estranged father resurfaced, played by Scott Bakula, and then when their long-lost mother resurfaced, played by Linda Hamilton. They chased around after her captor’s daughter for awhile, wasting a lot of time with the pretense that their mom was a rogue agent, as well as that the daughter would be among the good guys.

Perhaps not surprisingly, no on both counts.

So as new characters surface and there’s all the confusion as to whether they are good or not, Chuck bounces haplessly along, getting into all sorts of scrapes and misadventures, usually with quirky visuals and some element or other of wackiness.

And he wants to be a spy, and then he doesn’t, and Sarah wants to and she doesn’t, and they’ve run these scenarioes in every combination, including Chuck as a spy without the Intersect.

Changing it up

So this season they just got a new Chuck. Morgan was exposed to the Intersect and went completely rock star, Charlie Sheen insane. Meanwhile, it seems Chuck and Sarah are coordinating with the CIA?now rather than working for them, although they assisted with thwarting an assassination plot against Morgan at a Buy More retreat.

Meanwhile, Morgan’s Intersect was flawed in some fundamental way that made him a jerk to all his friends, including his girlfriend, Alex, who is John Casey’s daughter.

So, the show having had all the fun it was planning to, Morgan’s Intersect was removed this week.

But Morgan’s clearly wasn’t the only personality being played around with as the fifth season opened.?Sarah wanted to experience what it was like to just lead a normal life and have normal friends who weren’t in the spy game. Chuck’s sister, Ellie, a doctor, wanted to go back to work after the birth of her daughter so Chuck’s brother-in-law, also a doctor, stayed home with the baby and was completely happy with this arrangement – although Ellie was not.

And Jeff, Chuck’s crazy co-worker, was discovered to have been breathing carbon monoxide all this time living in his van. Once he stopped he became ... normal.

All of these personality shifts came to a head in last week’s episode when Morgan determined it was more dangerous than cool for him to have the Intersect in his head and he had it removed – along with his complete knowledge of all things geek. Sarah realized having regular friends made her more vulnerable, Ellie realized she tried to go back to work too quickly. And Jeff became so normal he had Lester arrested for trying to expose him to carbon monoxide and getting his crazy friend back again.

If they’re going somewhere with any of this ... now would be a good time to start. It seems like this show likes to set up a lot of “what if?” scenarios, explore them, and then brush them aside like nothing ever happened. It makes for poor character development, disrupts continuity and hurts the storytelling some.

Wackiness for the sake of it does both story and viewers a disservice.

“Chuck”?airs new episodes 8/7c Fridays on NBC.