TV REVIEW: Chuck Season 2

written by David Steffen

In the premier season of Chuck, the title character Chuck Bartowsky (Zachary Levi) had been living an unextraordinary life working at the BuyMore after being kicked out of Stanford based on false accusations of cheating, and dumped by his girlfriend.  Until he gets an unexpected email from Bryce Larkin (Matt Bomer), (the one who got him kicked out Stanford), that contains coded images containing government secrets that download themselves into Chuck’s brain, and after that if he sees something that is in the Intersect (the name for the computer storing the data), then he will suddenly know the information.  So Chuck has been working with CIA Agent Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) who has been posing as his girlfriend, and NSA Agent John Casey (Adam Baldwin) who has been posing as a co-worker at the BuyMore.  Season 2 ran from 2008-2009.

As season two starts, the team goes on what Chuck thinks will be his final mission, to retrieve a component needed to make a new computer-based Intersect so that Chuck can retire.  What he doesn’t know is that Casey has been given orders to kill Chuck as soon as the new Intersect is running, because he’s too much of a liability.  (Since this is all in Episode 1 of the season you can guess that neither does our title character get killed nor does he get to go back to normal civilian life).

Season two was a great build from season one, expanding on a great formula.  The BuyMore still plays the comedic foil to the more serious spy action.  The main difference in format from the previous season is that Chuck is getting more accustomed to the spywork, the action, and the lying, which makes sense, but it’s still good old sensitive Chuck, usually trying to talk about feelings on a mission while everyone else is trying to concentrate on not being dead.  There are some major revelations having to do with Chuck’s family in this season that are awesome and fun.

I loved season two just as much as season one.  Highly recommended, fun, generally lighthearted, with lots of spy action.