We’ve all got guilty pleasures when we watch TV. For me, it’s been Perfect Strangers, or MacGyver, or, yes I’ll admit it, Friends. What can I say, I’m a slave to the marketing machine. These are the shows you hesitate to mention in intellectual company (unless you are like me, and you intentionally mention them in such company to spice things up a bit).

I’m adding a new show to the list.

Quite by accident, I caught the first episode of NBC’s new series Chuck. Chuck is a dramedy send-up of the spy genre. The title character, Chuck, is a computer tech who get’s top-secret stuff uploaded into his head (this idea was stolen from any one of a number of episodes of Star Trek and/or Stargate SG1), and ends up being protected/used by the CIA and NSA. Stupid plot points – beautiful CIA-lady poses as his girlfriend, but she dated a now-dead spy who once got Chuck kicked out of college. Ooooh, tension. Really, all of that is irrelevant. Each of the stand-alone episodes focuses on some horribly contrived mission where the info in Chuck’s head proves useful, and in the end his everyman’s savvy pulls him out of a pinch when the super spies are unable to do so.

Sorry if I ruined it for you.

Looking back, I’ve just spent a good amount of time trashing a show I like. I guess the impressive thing is that I like the show in spite of all that. There’s something about the characters, likability we’ll call it, that sucks me in and leaves a disgusting warm fuzzy feeling in my chest when the obvious resolution is reached. Zach Levi as Chuck is very likable, and sometimes when I turn off the TV, I forget for a few moments that he’s not actually my friend.

Adam Baldwin co-stars as the hard-boiled NSA agent, and maybe I just feel obligated to support whatever he does since he did play the greatest character from anything ever as Jayne in Firefly.

Chuck is really not a very good show, but turn off your brain for an hour and give it a shot. It’s at least better than Dancing with the Stars.