Chuck and Big Bang Theory had free previews on Yahoo! So what the heck, I watched them. Â
I work in the IT department of a major insurance company, so I think I qualify as a geek…. plus I read Slashdot, and if THAT doesn’t seal the deal, what can?
Chuck – okay, if you’re going to make a show about a geek/nerd/whatever, would it kill you to run the script past one? The premise: a guy is running from people with guns! And they’re firing at him! If only… he… can… finish writing a quick email to his friend he hasn’t seen since college. Hey guys, could you quit it with the guns? I’m writing an email here.
Cut to Chuck, who staffs a kiosk called “The Nerd Herd” in some anonymous warehouse store. If they were meaning to riff off Best Buy’s “Geek Squad”, then instead of Chuck showing his fellow employees about a porn star virus which effects a certain kind of laptop that can’t possibly be important later in the show, he would be showing them how to pack it up to send it to the third-party repair folks who really fix the laptops for Best Buy.
Chuck’s sister plans a disastrous birthday party meant to introduce him to real girls, but of course it goes wrong, so Chuck silently escapes, turns his TV on and look, there’s an email… on his TV… and it has a password based on Zork. Supposedly. Now, every single oldschool game-loving geek would cheer if they read “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a mailbox here.” with Chuck. And they would scream, “OPEN THE MAILBOX!”. But no. Calm down. It’s not that.
So anyway he types in the answer, “use nasty knife on troll” (huh), and then that quick email turns out to be a montage of NBC’s fall lineup in black and white.
But no! It’s ALL NSA’s and CIA’s secrets! And since CHUCK has them, the NSA and the CIA no longer have any record of them whatsoever! In fact, the CIA (or the NSA, whatever) forgot that some general who was to address a conference in a hotel minutes from Chuck’s place, was to be blown up by a terrorist.
See, they researched this out, spied everywhere, found out what, where, who, and when, and then this guy emailed the details to Chuck and then they ALL FORGOT.
So anyway, Chuck, Jayne Alec Adam Baldwin, and the girl who was sleeping with his best friend from college whom he hadn’t heard from since until he destructively emailed Chuck all the nation’s secrets from his smartphone and then died Chuck’s future love interest save the day by finding the bomb, getting to the DOS prompt (well, he says he does, but he doesn’t actually), and setting off that porn star virus which stops the bomb… WITH OMG JUST ONE SECOND TO GO! PHEW!
So anyway. All the nation’s secrets are now in Chuck’s head, and the nation doesn’t have them anymore. Somehow. Won’t these secrets kinda get stale? Sure, he knew the date & location of this one general’s assassination, but new secrets are going to be happening from this point on that he will know nothing about, right?
Big Bang Theory – a pair of repellant, smelly losers and their idiot friends, and the porn star next door who undresses in their apartment. Nothing to see here. Apparently the people who did this show have never met an actual geek in their lives, and are just going by when they saw “Revenge of the Nerds” a few years back.
Now, my sister Genjer will insist that all IT people are exactly like this but BWAHA! These are PHYSICISTS! So there. And anyway, IT people aren’t like that. Out of everyone in my immediate department, I think I’m the only one who is even the slightest bit geeky in real life.
The IT Crowd (American) – Moss (Richard Ayoade) will join Joel McHale (The Soup) on the American adaptation of the British series in February. I thought the first season of the British series was brilliant (or should I say, BRIE-illiant), and the second season, without the IT focus, a little less funny… Dunno how the American one will go. I expect disaster.