Chuck and Balancing Acts on Television

I've talked about television before on this blog, but a recent foray into semi-obsessive (okay, genuinely obsessive) fandom for the show Chuck has got me thinking about it again. Specifically, about how major network television as an art form is so uniquely tied to its fans in a way no other art form really is.




For those who don't know, the show Chuck is a dramedy on NBC that features Zachary Levi as its titular character, Chuck Bartowski. Chuck begins the series as a former Stanford standout who got falsely kicked out of school and had his long-term girlfriend stolen from him at the same time, by his supposed best friend Bryce Larkin (played by Matt Bomer, the main character of USA Network's White Collar).

Turns out Larkin is now working as a CIA agent. He steals all the data from a computer called the Intersect, which is a computer designed to compile national security information from every American government agency. He then mysteriously sends the data to Chuck who, unwittingly, solves a puzzle to open the data and is assaulted by the images that the Intersect information is encoded in, giving him the ability to recall the data given a proper trigger.

The humble BuyMore Nerd Herd supervisor (an equivalent to Best Buy's Geek Squard), then is privy to all the nation's secrets. As such, he is assigned two agents-- one from the NSA, one from the CIA-- to protect him as he does his level best to help the American government thwart various terror plots. His NSA handler is John Casey (played by Firefly's Jayne Cobb, Adam Baldwin), and his CIA handler is Sarah Walker (played by Australian bombshell Yvonne Strahovski).



So. Sarah becomes Chuck's love interest, Casey is his reluctant friend and they have various spy missions and BuyMore-fueled hijinks throughout the series. Which brings any uninitiated pretty much where they need to be for me to talk about this topic.

Chuck is now in its third season and while, at the end of the second season, it seemed like the Chuck and Sarah romance was going to fully blossom, the third season (up until last night's episode) sent unexpected crushing blow after unexpected crushing blow to the relationship between the two. Fans of the show were kind of infuriated, growing progressively more so as the show made no effort to bring its two love interests together.

It's not the first time in Chuck that the show's writers have done this. There have been hiccups in the relationship between the two for the entire running of the show, but never had the pair been so on different pages emotionally for so long, a wait that seemed even longer with a month-long hiatus due to the Winter Olympics.

It illustrated, for me, a really interesting thing. In any television show, there is of course going to be a disconnect between what the fans want to see from their show and what the show's creators and writers want to portray. Any story needs tension, but every fan needs resolution. Give the fans what they want too often, and the show becomes cotton candy; no substance. Keep the tension ratcheted for too long and fans begin to revolt.

But in Chuck, the disconnect was even deeper. Many fans simply have a different view of what the show is than the show's creators do, even after three seasons.

The disconnect is this: Many fans see the show as being about Chuck and Sarah.

The show's creators approach the show as being about Chuck. Period.



That may seem obvious. I mean, it's the name of the show, and every episode is titled Chuck vs. something or another. Not Chuck and Sarah vs., or Chuck and Casey and Sarah vs., but Chuck vs. Truthfully, though, it is a bit confusing. Much of the drama in the first two seasons directly played off the relationship between the two, and it wasn't until the early-to-middle part of the second season that they began to introduce other interesting story devices in a way that suggested they were more than aside. In season three, those devices have taken to the forefront.

Each episode, though, has always been about what Chuck needs to learn next as a character. It's always approached from that angle. Even if what he needs to learn next is something that puts him in contention with his love interest, or puts him in a situation where that love story is ignored.

On paper, the semantics of being about Chuck or being about Chuck and Sarah seem like such a small difference that it shouldn't possibly affect such contention in its third season, but the disconnect here between artist and audience is so contentious because it's so simple. It's easy to blur the lines.

Major network television, like Chuck, has such an interesting balance that it needs to maintain, between doing something for the art of the show, and the direction that the show wants to go in, and doing things to keep fans happy, and its the only art form that has this problem. As I mentioned in my other TV blog, other art forms have venues for their more experimental proceedings, but major network television is predicated on ratings (even cable television is, though to a lesser extent) so violently that to risk your fan base for the sake of your piece of art is both bold and foolish.

I don't think any television show producer really knows the exact formula for keeping this balance of tension and resolution. Sitcoms get past this problem by being strictly about set-piece episodes, and having all conflict tied up within the arc of a single episode, rather than stretched out over a season, but for a major network show that does attempt to cover the simultaneous arcs I spoke of previously, it necessitates the type of risk taking that can get it canceled or alienate its fan base.

Sometimes shows don't get it. I would argue that the decision in Chuck last week to put another damper on the Chuck and Sarah relationship after they had just began to rebuild it was a poorly conceived move, regardless of how effectively they swung the pendulum back for last night's episode. Mainly because the build-up to their reconciliation had dragged on so long already that it seemed to take another step back would be to reconfirm all the angers that the fans had been expressing previously.

In other words, I would say that by teasing at the resolution earlier, than squandering it, they enhanced the frustrations of their audience far more than if they had either not teased at the resolution or had continued it throughout the three episodes.

It's hard to maintain balance on a teeter-totter. Even if you have two people of absolutely equal size on either end and have them level with each other, each side as to work (and work hard) to maintain that perfect balance. Sometimes one end messes up, which can lead to frustrations from the other end if they're holding up their side perfectly. Or it can lead to an overcorrection, which throws the whole thing out of whack again.



But trying to find that balance is an intriguing goal, and its part of why I enjoy watching television. It's the only medium in which striking that balance is such an overt goal. Pop music doesn't push for it as much, because so much of the success of pop music has more to do with marketing and advertising money than it does public choice. Blockbuster movies aren't quite as concerned with it because a movies failure doesn't affect that movie going forward, at least not in such a serious way as with a television show.

So it's fun to watch an art form that focuses on that crux so specifically, it's fun to watch something so large hinge on something so small and unpredictable.

Or, you know, maybe it just hinges on how hot the female lead is.