Fox picks up “sci-fi western with a twist.”

Because of the adoration for and longevity of Firefly, oh and, um, Brisco County, Jr., right?

Saaaaaad.

I hoped when I quit watching Smallville that I wouldn’t have to watch Kristin Kreuk make Concerned Frowny Faces any more.

Alas. Run, Chuck, save yourself!

How in the world did I forget (or, horror, did I not know?) that Kate Jackson was on an episode of Ally McBeal?

And in other “How did I not know that?” realms, only today did I get why it was such a big deal that Bruce Boxleitner plays Cap’n Awesome’s father on Chuck: Because BB was TRON. I still think it would have been even funnier if Kate Jackson had played Awesome’s mom, though. A little spy-show inheritance. Having learned this, I started thinking of maybe one more reason why Chuck is perennially on the bubble–it is just on the cusp of my generation (witness I’ve never seen TRON) and appeals to a small section of that generation, at that. Fingers crossed that they can get it moving in a growth direction without destroying the appeal …

And if you’re wondering how I got started on this line of thought, I spent a few minutes this morning watching some YouTube clips of Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Laugh all you want; it was a great show.

Those 13 episodes NBC ordered are apparently all they ordered–they won’t start till February, and there’s no way to sock a regular-length season into a semester. I don’t like the foreboding Jennifer Godwin’s use of the word “largesse” gives me, either: It sounds too much like Chuck is on seriously borrowed time.

Hopeful prediction: The show picks up viewers and returns to a solid full-season footing.

Dour prediction: The show stays the same, picks up no viewers, and is cancelled after the 13-run.

Dire prediction: The show peters out in confusion, loses more viewers, is cancelled even before the end of the 13-run, and I buy Season Two on DVD and pretend that Half-Season Three never happened. Veronica Mars may have been uneven, but at least it got three solid seasons and wrapped itself to a dignified conclusion.

NBC has ordered 13 episodes, under the condition that they become cheaper per episode through budget cuts that include limited actor face time and writing staff:

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news: The 13-episode pickup came after Warner Bros. agreed to make significant budget concessions, including scaling back the number of episodes several members of the show’s stellar supporting cast will appear in and, per one insider, possibly eliminating one actor altogether (R.I.P. Anna Wu?). The show is also expected to cut two of its staff writers.

The show has been set up to cut completely not only Anna Wu but also the entire Buy More team including Morgan–since Chuck quit the store and Morgan and Anna are moving to Hawaii, theoretically they could be dispensed with altogether. But if the Buy More angle is gone, what will replace it? This is part of the bigger question I have about Chuck: Can a parody show ever grow up? If not, I don’t see much future for the show despite the great characters. But if so, can it stay charming and funny?

Part of the show’s charm is the contrast between Chuck’s dull retail life, slumming out of his real element and surrounded by people who take the details of that life very seriously, and Chuck’s spy life, in which he is supposed to be out of his element and surrounded by people who take the details of that life very seriously. The play from one to the other constitutes a majority of the show’s humor. But it also leads to a rut. As season two went on, I found myself angry at Chuck for showing no growth whatsoever under the influence of his more “grown-up” life. When bullets have flown by your ears and people around you are giving and taking beatdowns for two years, you would generally tend to at least get hardened to those things if not actively involved and learning how to participate effectively, wouldn’t you? Yet Chuck kept cringing, yelping, rolling on the floor, and whining about how the government was ruining his life. I wanted him to grow up, and with his free choice to download Intersect 2.0 into his brain, based on the idea that he could make a real contribution to that grown-up life, I have some hope that he will. But Josh Schwartz seems to have a clear idea as to the next directions of the show, and I’m wondering how grown up either Chuck or the show itself will be:

TVGuide.com: These new flashes that give Chuck an ability, how long will each one last? Like, could he “forget” kung fu in the middle of a fight?
Schwartz: What I will say is that people who are concerned that these new powers will somehow change the tone of the show or of our guy, don’t be. There is a plan in place, and the tone of the show and Chuck’s underdog quality will remain intact.

TVGuide.com: Will he flash on, like, a foreign language one week? And then safecracking skills the next? That kind of a thing?
Schwartz: There are a lot of options, a lot of opportunities for us to go down different paths.

TVGuide.com: Might this make Casey, who’s used to being the bacon-saver, a bit jealous?
Schwartz: Certainly we’re always, always looking for ways to heighten conflict between Chuck and Casey. That’s a really fun dynamic for the show.

TVGuide.com: Will there be implications for Chuck and Sarah with this new development?
Schwartz: The most immediate way it impacts them is they can only be together if he is not the asset. That’s why they were able to move their relationship forward in the penultimate episode, because the Intersect was out of his head, and she was no longer going to need to protect him. But now…

So Chuck will remain an underdog even if he has phenomenal cosmic powers. It sounds like a bit of a tall order, but what concerns me more is the attitude towards the Chuck/Sarah relationship and the seeming marriage to the status quo. I know that older shows kept the leads apart for years and that the writers have probably not scratched the surface of what they can do to Chuck and Sarah, but Schwartz’s stated reasoning is a little bit tired at this point. The objection to Sarah being involved with the asset was that she would allow her personal feelings for Chuck to dictate her actions in missions, when the truth is those feelings already dictate her actions, as was acknowledged and embraced in the episode where Number Six almost became Chuck’s new handler. How could her feelings be any more influential if she were actually sleeping with Chuck as opposed to in love with him from two feet away?

The finale handled all this very poorly, as I remarked at Crosblog. In fact it appears that they had to engineer the finale very clumsily specifically to keep Chuck “the asset” without giving them any possible chance of being together in any other way. If Chuck wanted to be with Sarah so much, why would he turn down out of hand and without consideration, as he did in the finale, working as an analyst on the new Intersect project, of which Sarah was to be head? Are they seriously trying to tell us he had no idea what Sarah would do next until after he turned that down? Seriously trying to tell us that Sarah wouldn’t have said “Uh, Chuck, I’m actually going to be working on that project, and we can work together, wink-wink”? And what changed for Sarah in the sixteen TV minutes between when she told Chuck she was leaving and when she told Bryce she wasn’t going with him? And Bryce just runs happily away with his new “handler,” never having met this guy before, having no idea he could be a bad guy, and Beckman etc. don’t notice that Sarah’s not doing her job? The whole plot, and indeed a lot of the show itself, is premised on the idea that people don’t communicate properly, or at all, and that they will never notice certain obvious things right in front of them or draw any conclusions if they do.

But if the writers did manage to successfully pull off a more grown-up Chuck, where would the parody aspect go? Without the Buy More contrast, and with Chuck no longer able to whine that all this is happening to him against his will, where will the “nerd in an untenable situation” vibe that Schwartz seems determined to preserve even come from?

I’m concerned about the direction of the show, to say the least, and believe the writers are setting themselves firmly between a rock (keep the show’s jaunty, embarrassment-comedy vibe) and a hard place (do that while showing character growth). Judging by Schwartz’s comments it seems like they will continue the former at the expense of the latter, and given the budgetary constraints and the fact that shows produced by a company other than the parent network are tumbling like dominoes these days (Chuck is produced by Warner Brothers rather than anything owned by NBC), I’m concerned that these next 13 episodes will peter out in a confused tumble until NBC pulls the plug.

One of my childhood favorites, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, managed something of Chuck’s schtick for four seasons, but A) they didn’t proclaim up front that the leads were in love with each other, something we got to watch come about gradually, thus sparing us from the excuses that they couldn’t be together because they worked together and B) Amanda King was in her role because she had something to contribute that Scarecrow couldn’t easily get any other way. Her contributions were only partly an accident of timing and more largely turned on her personality and her willingness to step up out of her original comfort zone–and her character definitely grew along the way. The show ended when her character had grown to the point where she could no longer conceivably be painted as a bumbling housewife who might or might not have what it takes to be a spy. Chuck has now chosen of his own free will to be a spy and his character must grow through that or the show will die–but if he does grow, parts of the show will necessarily die and change the tone until the show either is cancelled or takes on a whole different vibe. Not an easy outlook either way. But don’t get me wrong: I definitely look forward to seeing how it will go, come what may. Josh’s final note of doom: More Jeffster. Help!

NBC announced its fall schedule this morning, without Chuck, but not because it’s cancelled–the final decision is delayed until May 19.

So … what do they have left to decide, given that there are no more episodes this season by which to gauge ratings? Are they seeing how many Subway footlongs we can buy between now and then?

If that’s what it took, I’d buy a footlong weekly as long as the show was on the air. Sure. But that being the case, why don’t we just go ahead and admit that with the coming of DVRs, TV has moved past the advertising model and should just go to a pay model? Most of us are paying for our channels as it is. Under a new model, you could pay for only the channels you want, or even better, pay for the shows you want–and if subscriptions to a particular show aren’t high enough, then it’s cancelled. This would be far more concrete than ratings, which don’t really measure in real numbers how big a particular show’s audience is. And if your subscription drops off, you have hard numbers on that end too and thus undeniable justification for cancellation.

Down side: Not much wiggle room to try to improve the show if your subscribers drop off–because if they’ve dropped off, they won’t see the improvement and thus be enticed to come back. Other drawbacks I’m missing? Aside from the mechanics of making your box show only the shows you subscribe to rather than a series of channels?

**SPOILERS** for last night’s House below. (more…)

Four episodes in, I’m feeling a little better about the future of Castle, though the primary problem, the lack of chemistry between Castle and Beckett (real cute on her name, too, guys, although the symbolism could have been better), is not solved. The core problem with Beckett’s character, which leads to the chemistry problem, is that she is inconsistent. She’s hot, and knows it (“You have no idea” from the first episode and this week’s “distract him with legs” stunt) yet won’t give him the time of day while at the same time bemoaning her lack of action as though she’s a shut-in nerd. What possible real-life woman does this resemble? A woman with the confidence to show up in a thigh-length hot-pink number and drop her coat does not bewail her lack of dates to the M.E. in the morgue. This is partly a writer problem, but also an actor problem–she is high-strung, unlike, say, Dani Reese of Life who plays hard as nails, cool as ice, and faintly nose-wrinkling over Crews while allowing her respect for him to depend on his work, not on his quirks. Which part of the woman are we supposed to buy into here? I actually could buy the shut-in nerd kind of a thing, since she reads all Castle’s books, kind of an Ellen Barkin in The Big Easy (she was also high strung), but that negates the “I’m hot and I know it” act that Sarah Shahi does so easily for Dani Reese.

It’s frustrating, because otherwise I would not have dreamed there was an actress working with whom Nathan Fillion couldn’t produce chemistry. Come on, writers, come on, Katic, decide on the character’s primary motivation here. Isn’t that the first thing they teach you in drama school?

Enough of the negative–the show is mostly flowing a lot more smoothly, the character of Castle’s mother is fitting in better, the daughter’s delightful although too unbelievably perfect–as is Castle himself. Does he have no flaws that can’t be overcome by looking cute? But I am enjoying the show quite a bit and hope it continues finding its feet quickly.

I can’t really say I’m crying much about this. Veronica was always a merry-go-round between in-love-and-kinda-tortured and on-the-outs-and-kinda-tortured but always utterly self-possessed, and that’s how the series ended: Veronica standing alone and us waiting to see what round she would take on the chin next. A movie would do …. what? Serenity cleared up one large Firefly plot device (Reavers) with aplomb, but also, oh yeah, killed not one but two major characters while it was at it, because Joss is something of a sadistic mofo when he wants to be and hey! life never changes on a dime and if actors say they’re not going to do any more Firefly movies, well then, by gad, kill their characters quick because they’ll never change their minds.

Okay, maybe I have a small issue with movies meant to wrap up TV shows. But in the case of Veronica Mars, what is there left to wrap up? There will be a mystery, and there will be the side-issue of Veronica’s love story. Will they bring back Duncan in yet another improbable twist–reconciliation, with his kidnapping of his daughter and his commissioning of the murder of Aaron Echolls hanging over him? They lose all the Logan-Veronica shippers that way. Will it be a happy ending for Logan and Veronica instead? Unlikely, given Rob Thomas’s preference for keeping them on-again, off-again. So what’s left? The mystery. Rob Thomas had one awesome idea, the solution to question of Lily’s murderer in season one, and he played it out masterfully over the course of the full season. The other two seasons, not so much with the awesome ideas. What’s left to do? Veronica ended on a noir-ish note of standing alone with things going wrong, but with the idea that Veronica would pull through as she always does.

At this point I just don’t think there’s much more to say of her than that.

H/t: J.

Is there anything cuter than David Boreanaz, except of course for Nathan Fillion?

(Aside: Joss kind of has a type, doesn’t he?)

(Aside: I feel so sorry for Rachael with her voice problem. I hope her doctors and therapists are able to sort her out. Judging by the sound of her voice on the above video, they are still postponing surgery.)

(Via Whedonesque.)

Pretty straightforward (both the show, and this review): He’s good, although so far the writers aren’t allowing him to show much real feeling, and she’s pretty bad. They’re both playing a bit over the top, but with him it seems like that’s the only way he thinks the character would go over, while with her it feels like it’s just the only way she knows how to play it. What her character needs: More Dani Reese. Stat. Play it down and actually have a hard shell, not just pretend to.

And while this article (via Whedonesque) goes on at length about their chemistry, so far I see no evidence of it. She’s about as attractive as a cast-iron icicle. He’s doing a little better, more like James Woods as Shark, but you can’t make a fire without friction.

Verdict: Will last longer than Drive, but that’s a pretty low bar. Put up something real pretty soon, guys.

Little bitty **SPOILER** for last night’s episode of Chuck below. (more…)

I have a sick child and plenty of other family/friend life issues occurring, so blogging is at a low. But I do want to know one thing, spoiler-free, please: With approximately five characters I care about still left identified “human” or at least non-Cylon (Adama, Starbuck, Apollo, Gaeta, and Roslin), why in the world should I bother watching last season and this current, final season of Battlestar Galactica? Come on, my TV peeps, help me out. I suspect disappointment is in my future and would rather not court it by watching.