So I gave Chuck a second chance today. For some reason I've been repulsed by this show. It has always seemed like an insipid cow clothed in a robe of golden thread and put on the cover of Vogue.
I have only seen the show once last year. But today, I was painting upstairs and half watched / half listened to it because I was too lazy to clean up enough to change the channel.
Let me give this synopsis of the very first part of the show - Chuck is a spy (of sorts) who has recently gotten a normal girlfriend. She used to be unwittingly involved with a bad guy as his assistant or some such. Now Chuck and his friends must find some sort of list that will tell the good guys who all of the bad guy's allies & agents are.
Now for the game - made even better by the advent of TiVo. You pause the TV and announce to those watching with you - "I could write this shit". You should try to do this in an obnoxious and bold way, thus making you even more awesome when you are right - and even more of a douche bag when you're wrong.
After said announcement, you must prophesize what will happen next before unpausing the scene to see if you are a Hollywood Nostradamus. Thus you will have earned either the right to gloat because you can peer into the minds of mediocre TV writers, or be derided because you've just made a huge ass of yourself.
I'm pretty sure the average reader here is ready to stop scrolling down and announce - "I could blog this shit"
Like you, I was ready to play after having seen only the intro of Chuck. Even solo, I stopped to announce to the paint drying around me - Chuck's girlfriend would get involved in the plot to uncover the list, but in an endearing way that would make her seem more trustworthy. Then at the very end of the episode she would be alone with Chuck and we would discover that she was among the enemies of the Chuck's spy agency.
Sometimes this game is too easy.
Pete: 1
Chuck: 0
So now you have a new game to play with your TiVo. I'm sure one of you clever blokes could also make it into a drinking game if you were so inclined. Good luck, and good luck finding a TV show that will actually stump you.
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2 comments:
What a terrific game! You are soooo on to something there, Pete!
About the show, I have to say I found the show largely uninteresting. A good friend of our's recommended it to me and I generally respect his opinion but for whatever reason this show just fell flat for me. It's meant to be the television equivalent of popcorn-munching "fun," I think. You're not supposed to take it very seriously and it's meant to be a good laugh. Unfortunately, it never came off as particularly clever or stylistically "cool" in any particular way, although it seems to be desperately trying hard on this point. You're supposed to feel compassion for the main character but he just comes off as hopelessly pathetic. There's nothing remotely real about the show, and it doesn't seem to poke fun at itself, as you kind of expect it would. At least, I didn't get the sense the humor was very tongue-in-cheek, it seemed to say, "if the Matrix could do it, so can we!" Yeah, and look how that turned out.
Have you seen the show "Reaper"? I didn't rate it very highly initially, but I do like Ray Wise (Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks) as Lucifer. It kind of felt like a less serious (if that's possible) Buffy/Angel. It's just the characters are more annoying (I'm afraid that Tyler Labine just comes off as repulsive--perhaps that's what he's going for, but it's hardly charming). I did catch an episode recently that had some characters from the defunct (but superlative) MTV comedy show The State, which racheted it up a few notches in my estimation.
>What a terrific game! You are
>soooo on to something there, Pete!
I know, huh?!?!
I also remember playing this when I watched the first episode of Firefly on DVD and was WAY off.
And yes, we agree that (let's call him) Susan isn't up to his usual discriminating self when it comes to Chuck.
Reaper - which is okay, but only okay - I tried it for a bit because of Kevin Smith's involvement. Unfortunately its not as a writer, and the way that you can really tell is in the dialog. I think it could have been something special, but falls flat.
Reaper tries to have humorous depth while maintaining a Doctor Who-ish (which I love) sensibility but gets neither quite right.
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