The Superpowered Nerd (and The Crude Best Friend)

Posted by Maggie September 26th, 2007 at 11:42am In Chuck

It’s probably way too soon to turn this in to a proper examination, on par with The Truth-Telling Anti-Hero Asshole With a Heart of Gold or The Persnickety Hero-Genius, but the similarities between Reaper’s Sam and Chuck’s Chuck (and, in a subcategory, Reaper’s Sock and Chuck’s Morgan) are just too many and obvious to ignore.

Chuck is nerd who suddenly becomes a human computer, with government secrets locked away in his brain. Sam is a nerd who suddenly becomes the devil’s henchman, ferreting souls back into the underworld. Though each of these shows have only aired pilots, it is clear that Chuck and Sam share some defining characteristics.

1. The Lack of a Life Plan. Chuck works at the Nerd Herd of a Best Buy type of place, and Sam works as a stockboy at a Home Depot type of place. They probably run into each other in the parking lot all the time. Neither job is particularly fulfilling for our protagonists, but they don’t really have any other ideas.
2. The Troubles With Women. Chuck hasn’t had a girlfriend since his college girlfriend went for his roommate. Sam didn’t go to college, and so doesn’t even have that to fall back on. Beautiful/traumatized women remain juuuuust out of reach: Chuck’s spy friend who’s spy boyfriend just died, and Sam’s co-worker friend whose father’s death keeps Sam at bay.
3. The Incalculably Worse Off Best Friend. Sock is a Jack Black/Jonah Hill/Kevin Smith best bud, always ready with an off-color remark. Morgan is less of a well-defined type, but equally hopeless. Both of these best friends are pretty much the only reason Sam and Chuck can go on living.
4. The Comically Inappropriate Superpower. Chuck’s brain is a computer! Or something! The point is, he can predict terrorism. Sort of. Sam works for the devil! Which means he has the Force! I mean, duh, right?
5. The Immense Difficulty of Their Task. Both dudes are completely unprepared for fighting crime or hell’s escapees. But no doubt they will find themselves learning a little something about themselves in the process.
6. The Secrets That Will Tear Us Apart. Of course, if everyone knew about these superpowers, they’d freak out and probably do something crazy. So Sam and Chuck must keep some things to themselves. Chuck’s lady friend knows but no one else, and Sam can tell his slacker buddies and no one else. I predict that this secrecy will not last long; they’ve got to get their Scooby gang together eventually.

Though they’re both nerds, Chuck is more of a smart nerd and Sam is more of a slacker nerd. This may explain why, in the end, I like Chuck more (both the show and the character). In the pilots, both shows were trying really, really hard to be funny, but I think I laughed more at Chuck. Reaper has the crude Apatow/Kevin Smith thing going for it, but I liked the occasional sweetness of Chuck, and the action sequences were far more well-thought-out and executed.

However, it would be foolish to underestimate the impact of Ray Wise as the devil. I like Adam Baldwin all right, but he needs thirty years and a history of unstable characters to reach Ray Wise’s level of menace.

It will be interesting to see which show prevails in the long-term (if either — or, perhaps, both). And who knows, maybe when (if) they complete their seasons, they won’t even have that much in common any more, and I’ll have to revisit this concept.