Month: October 2007

In a season that’s typically been characterised by pilots – both poor and good – that have been quickly followed by better second and third episodes, it’s almost refreshing to come across a show with a good first episode that’s quickly gone on to squander goodwill with its second and third episodes.

Chuck, in which a common or garden computer repairman gets all the NSA’s spy data dumped into his brain, had one of the better pilots this Fall. A mixture of comedy and action, with a good cast, its only problem seemed to be having Charlie’s Angels director McG as one of its exec producers. Certainly, you can see his telltale fingerprints all over it, from the kickboxing blonde babe in a short skirt to the high explosion count per episode.

But episodes two and three have been somewhat lacklustre and unexciting. The comedy has been pretty insipid; the action has been pretty… insipid. It’s still fun. It’s still relatively enjoyable and there aren’t many dull moments. But the show lost its mojo before it even really found it.

Oh well. If you have an idle hour on a Monday, you can tune it, but Chuck is now unfortunately on a par with the other slacker dramedy of the moment, Reaper.

So The Medium is Not Enough declares Chuck to be a 3 or Minor Caruso on The Carusometer quality scale. A Minor Caruso corresponds to a show “in which David Caruso might guest star as a technical support operator. He will ask everyone with a computer problem whether they’ve ‘tried shooting it’ and will pile up laptops to stand on them, when faced with potentially taller actors.”

Journeyman – aka Quantum Leap: The Next Generation aka The Time Traveler’s Wife for People Who Can’t Read or Don’t Like Highly Pretentious Characters – started off with a relatively promising first episode. It wasn’t absolutely gripping and suffered from more than a few cliché s, but it was relatively engrossing and had at least a few intriguing concepts.

Trouble is, since then, it’s done nothing to accentuate the positives and has mostly pushed the negatives. We’re three episodes in now and we still don’t have a clue why Dan the man is doing all this ‘travelling’ as the other traveller he bumps into from time to time calls it. We don’t know why she’s doing it either. None of them do. Are we just going to watch him saving idiots every week, or are there going to be answers coming any time soon? No idea and there are no suggestions we’re ever going to know.

While the producers are now taking the trouble to flesh out the secondary characters, are veering away from making Dan have second thoughts about being with his wife, and are making her even more like a certain wife of a person who travels in time, there’s still no one to really identify with, like or generally care about. If everyone weren’t so serious about everything, you know, maybe cracked a joke or was a little less sombre – hell, I’d settle for a smile, rather than the wry grins that are all the cast seem able to muster – it might be more appealing.

So although it’s all well written and I’ll probably stick with it, it’s just hard to actually enjoy it and want to stick with it. It might get better, there might be answers, but I suspect it’ll be cancelled before anything worthwhile happens.

So The Medium is Not Enough declares Journeyman a two or “Partial Caruso” on The Carusometer quality scale. A Partial Caruso corresponds to “a show with two walk-on cameos by David Caruso as a time traveller. Trying to speak in an English accent because ‘everyone spoke with an English accent in the past’, he’ll find other actors unwilling to interact with him, pretending that ‘he left a second ago’.”