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"FacebookPinterestChuck.png\n\nSo, one week ago today, I defended Heroes. I wound up getting a lot of emails about that. They were mostly abusive, mostly abusive in such very specific ways regarding my lameness and poor taste and sense of shame (or lack thereof) that they all bled together. One, however, stood out. It was from one of our writers, one of our finest bona fide print-edition writers, and it expressed simply a certain surprise that I watched Heroes, that I watched network television at all, living as I did in my \"uptown cloister of high culture.\" This got me thinking. Uptown, sure. Uptown from him, anyway, and from most of them, really, who are all in fact out in Brooklyn, which hardly even counts, does it, as \"town.\" High culture? Well, if me sitting here reading one of my several copies of Ulysses while the Kronos Quartet interprets Philip Glass's String Quartets Nos. 2-5 rather gorgeously in the background is to what he's referring, then fine, guilty as charged. But a cloister? Hardly. I get out all the time.\n\nIn any case, he's a smart fellow and I respect his opinion and I decided he had a point. So I quit TV. On Monday. Canceled the service, left the set out on the sidewalk. Did I feel a little twinge at missing that Heroes season finale? Maybe. Maybe not. I defended it; I don't want to marry it. But there was another twinge, a slightly more painful twinge, and that was the twinge of missing Chuck.\n\nChuck is a TV show so embarrassing to like that when someone (not me) accidentally blurted out at a recent staf meeting that he was really digging it (to which I did agree, aloud and with vehemence, much to my own immediate chagrin), he was soundly shunned for almost a full week. One other person who'd witnessed the whole shameful scene did deign to email the two of us, despite our pariah status, and concede to tuning in on occasion, but only because co-star Yvonne Strahovski is such a \"brutal, A-bomb-hot babe. And an Australian Pole!\" Is she? I never noticed. She's blonde, right? I have noticed Mini Anden as the\u2014what's the lingo? \"A-bomb-hot\"?\u2014DEA agent, but that's because she's an actual supermodel and sort of impossible not to notice. Though I have been accused among countless other crimes of having the most lamentable taste in women. Which is neither here nor there. I'm not watching Chuck for the ladies.\n\nAnd I don't think you really are either, whether you prefer the rather obvious but admittedly ass-kicking Yvonne or the mysterious Mini featured not-nearly-often-enough on the show. I suspect that you may be watching Chuck (if you are, which you certainly don't have to admit to here) on the basest level because Zachary Levi as the title character is your typical dorky everyday guy, a member of the \"Nerd Herd\" at the Buy More superstore and pitied by his successful older sister and her Captain Awesome husband, just like anyone (except me, because I'm a girl, and live in an uptown cloister of high culture and have no such concerns), except unlike just anyone he's been unwittingly embedded with an entire database of super-secret spy information. In his brain. And so then has to be a spy. With Yvonne Strahovski. Who sort of secretly loves him. Which is basically every guy's fantasy. (A quick informal poll around the office has determined that yes, the gentlemen do in fact prefer the Australian Pole to the Swedish supermodel. Whatever.)\n\nFacebookPinterestChuck3.png\n\nBut beyond the attractive ladies and the geek-turned-superspy fantasy element, and beyond the Bond-derivative opening credits and pretty glorious sense of high camp throughout, is a show that's actually sort of smart, in the in-joke way that those Scary Movie movies were. You had to really know the source material in order to get it, and if you did, and if you paid attention, they were slyly clever in the ways they snuck those references in. As with Chuck. Like, the last episode I watched (may my TV rest in peace) had an entire Fight Club-homage subplot, enacted of course by the disgruntled and downtrodden employees of the Buy More. Was it totally ridiculous? Of course. If you didn't know Fight Club, would it have played? Maybe not. But I do know Fight Club, just like as a fairly rabid consumer of pop culture for the past, I don't know, twenty years, I know Chinatown, The Big Lebowski, The Matrix, Die Hard, The O.C. (I don't know The O.C., actually, because during its run I had a boyfriend with standards, but I know of it and I'm told it's been referenced in Chuck, which would make sense, as the two shows share a creator in Josh Schwartz), The Love Boat, The Godfather, Full Metal Jacket, Steve Jobs (most recently of iPad fame!), The Dukes of Hazzard, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Quantum Leap, and\u2014over the course of one particularly obsessive month of exile in Provincetown\u2014the entirety of Battlestar Galactica. All of which don't begin to even scratch the surface of the touchstones that have been blatantly or more often subtly, sneakily, hilariously but not-so-you'd-right-away-notice-ably woven into the at-first-glance pretty straightforward Chuck.\n\nSo, on the one hand, reviewing the list above, one could say that I've canceled my cable subscription just in time. But one could also give Chuck some credit for being the ultimate ego-stroke for your average pop culture nerd, which, when you think about it, makes it surprising that more of the guys around here aren't tuning in. If I weren't so over trying to convince anyone of anything anymore and retreating for good into my freshly pop-culture-scrubbed uptown cloister, I'd suggest that they\u2014and you\u2014give it a shot. Watch a season. Pay attention. And then, if you all still find it stupid and ghetto and over-the-top and under par and not quite enough of anything, really, to compete in the Monday-night time slot with House or How I Met Your Mother (we do love Neil Patrick Harris over here, and 13 gives Ms. Strahovski some pretty stiff competition), your emails will be graciously received at forgetitjake@gq.com. \u2014Kira Henehan"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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