Chuck has won six critical awards including two Emmys and two Teen Choice awards. But what do the critics have to say about the coolest spy show on TV?
Chuck: The Complete Fourth Season
Before Chuck even premiered, the reviews looked promising. Back in 2007, when the show started, Rolling Stone magazine put it on its “We Like to Watch” list, saying quote “Chuck wipes the floor with the other fall debuts.”
That same year, Chuck was featured on USA Today’s list of the “10 TV Picks for 2007″, and they called leading man Levi’s performance “winning.” Though USA Today only gave the show three out of four stars, it was all in all a glowing review.
Chuck has often been compared to another show that debuted in Fall of 2007 called Reaper. Both shows starred a twenty year old “loser” who gets drawn into the world of heroic behavior pretty much against his will. Chuck lasted . . . Reaper did not.
In December of 2008, Time Magazine called Chuck one of the top 10 TV series of the year, as did the Chicago Tribune, The Newark Star-Ledger, The Miami Herald, The New York Observer, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The Post-Gazette went so far as to call it one of the few bright spots in an awful year of television, 2008.
TV critic Maureen Ryan glowed that “Chuch pays attention to the mechanics of storytelling and doesn’t just try to coast on the comedy. Given the level of attention paid to all those other things—emotion, suspense, plotting, character—Chuck ends up being one of the TV scene’s greatest pleasures at the moment.”
Another critic, Angel Cohn, called Chuck a well-written show, saying “it features some of the smartest and most quick-witted dialogue on TV”. Finally, James Poniewozik of Time magazine went a little overboard, saying that Chuck is a “delight” and that the show’s fourth season “quickly jump back in, with higher stakes and sharper jokes.”
With a premise that critics have called alternately “fresh” and “appealing” and “new,” it is no wonder that USA Today called Chuck NBC’s “best scripted hour of TV.
Critics love Chuck, even if the show never found the fan base it should have. DVD and Blu-Ray sales prove that Chuck has an audience, one that should come back in droves once the final season airs.