Chuck renewed!!

Well, the apocalypse has been postponed for one more year (at least) since NBC has renewed the best program in the history of television—no, pretentionistas, not The Wire—Chuck. Furthermore, NBC has cancelled the seemingly incurable venereal disease of broadcast television: Heroes. Had Chuck not been renewed and had Heroes not been cancelled, I would have howled into the night sky, my jaw coming unhinged, cracking like a wet gunshot, nine heads of the Lernaean Hydra blossoming out of my mouth like a horrifying flower, devouring everyone on earth body and soul. So, yeah, just in case you were wondering how the world was going to end—that’s how.

I think every Chuck fanboy breathed a sigh of relief upon seeing Chuck on NBC’s fall schedule, because last season there was a very public, very long campaign to bring Chuck back for a third season and NBC didn’t cave until late summer, which meant Chuck couldn’t air until midseason, after the Winter Olympics. There was no such bullshit this time around. Sure, fans campaigned using the awesome power of the flash mob, but it was nowhere near the epic proportions of last year’s eleventh hour tactics; tactics that included consuming outrageous amounts of Subway sandwiches.
The details of Chuck’s renewal are a lot like last year’s details in that it has been picked up for 13 episodes with the option to pick up the back nine episodes should the program perform well. This may sound bad but NBC picked up six extra episodes of Chuck this season, which shows that it is possible for the program to air nearly a full season without necessarily being picked up for one. Also, budget cuts were a big issue for the renewal last season, cuts that led to secondary characters being cut out; there were no such cuts during this year’s renewal. The only production change that I’ve heard will happen during Chuck’s fourth season is that the futuristic frozen yogurt shop, the Orange Orange, will now be a Subway. Despite this, I have a feeling Yvonne Strahovski will manage to make the Subway uniform sexy.

Though the move to renew Chuck has healed some of the wounds left by the Jay Leno debacle and the dismal turn Heroes took for the last three seasons has put NBC into my good books, I still they think they have a lot of work to do as a network. However, this work is a double edged sword. Yes, I would like them to take the shit out of their lineup, but without the shit in their lineup, Chuck probably would not have been renewed. The reason for this being that Chuck has only been pulling 5.5 million viewers a night (which is still nearly 1 million higher than Heroes was pulling near the end), which is a low enough rating to get it cancelled by nearly every other broadcast network. I would love to chalk Chuck’s renewal up to the unimpeachable quality of the program, but it is simply because NBC is too weak not to renew it. This is a sad realization, but I’m not one to look a gift peacock in the mouth.