“Reaper” — Magic + “Chuck” — Chuck Versus The Wookie
From here on out I’m grouping together Chuck and Reaper into a single post because, let’s be honest, they’re basically the same show with a really good series buried somewhere between the two. While Chuck has continued to grow into itself since it launched last month, Reaper has struggled to provide reasons for return visits. This week it took the first step toward rectifying this problem. More after the jump…
The problem with Reaper the past three weeks has been the cookie-cutter nature of every episode. Things were timed so consistently, one could set their watch to the action. This week they finally managed to hit the requisite plot points, but to do so in ways a little more innovative. For starters, it helped that Andi was brought into the mix at the hands of The Devil, giving Sam some added motivation. The episode also worked for me because Sam started to stand up for himself against The Devil’s unreasonable requests, and both of these things added to the episode’s greatest strength: more screen time for Ray Wise.
I’m still not entirely convinced they can maintain the structure for very long without driving the audience slowly insane. Was this week an anomaly or a positive sign of things to come? At this stage its hard to say, but it certainly bought the show a few more weeks in my Tuesday night lineup.
Chuck, on the other hand, has definitely settled into a nice little groove, making it a very enjoyable, if utterly forgettable hour of television. Between the two shows Chuck is more consistently fun to watch, though that’s probably because its lead is a faux-loser whereas Sam on Reaper is an actual loser. There is nothing about Zach Levi’s portrayal that suggests anything other than cool-guy, and if we’ve learned anything from a century of motion-based entertainment it’s that it’s a hell of a lot more fun watching the cool-guy than the loser.
It doesn’t hurt that Chuck is coated in a pristine gloss of post-production awesomeness, where Reaper seems to be happy enough in the fact the CW let them shoot the thing in color. I suppose that fact is what makes the sins of Chuck way more forgivable over the long run. Still, this isn’t a show that is going to rock anyone to their core — unless of course that someone is a 12-year-old boy impressed by the all of the pretty girls fighting.
Twenty-four hours after the episode aired I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it until I looked online to refresh my memory on the plot (something about a diamond that was wanted for reasons that never seemed particularly clear and OH LOOK AT THAT, SHE’S WEARING A BIKINI AND USING A THROWING STAR!). Like the previous week’s episode, the best moments were those where Chuck’s life at Buy More started to melt into his life as a secret agent (or at least secret agent’s apprentice) — specifically the scenes involving Morgan, who kind of reminds me of a more socially acceptable and network friendly version of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia — but, you know, without the paint huffing, complete lack of social skills and life in utter squalor.
Neither Chuck nor Reaper has managed to produce an episode this season one could classify as GREAT, but I don’t think that’s what anyone who is watching these shows is particularly looking for. Instead, GOOD can go a long way with out big-box employed misfits.
