Word: chucking
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...some cases, you actually might be. Spy comedy Chuck (NBC, Mondays, 8 p.m. E.T.) returns like an old friend back from a year abroad: still likable, still funny, but with an added note of intrigue. Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) is a salesman in the Nerd Herd of a big-box electronics store. One day he gets an e-mail that implants his brain with the U.S. government's classified data bank. Overnight, he becomes a conscripted secret agent and a marked man. (Remember, people: Never open unfamiliar attachments...
...premise is so frothy you could destroy it by blowing on it, but the show is a delight, driven by Levi's geek charm and Chuck's tentative romance with his fed overseer, Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski). The new episodes quickly jump back in, with higher stakes and sharper jokes, and creator Josh Schwartz hasn't let the strike stop him from developing Chuck's character. He's gone from nebbish-out-of-water to nerdily assured operative, capable of seducing an enemy agent over cocktails with high-IQ trivia banter ("... and that is the true history behind the croissant...
...Like Chuck, NBC's Life should have an advantage returning poststrike: its episodes are also designed to be enjoyed individually, with simple ongoing plots. This format was in vogue at the networks in 2007, a step back from complicated serials like Lost that virtually demand a postgraduate degree to watch. The strategy amounts to unintentional strike-proofing, since it requires viewers to remember less mythology. Like canned peas, these shows are just as enjoyable after a year on the shelf...
...would accuse Pushing Daisies (ABC, Wednesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.; returns Oct. 1) of overfamiliarity. Piemaker Ned (Lee Pace) can raise the dead by touching them. If he touches them again, they die again; if he leaves them alive for a minute, someone else dies. He reanimates his childhood crush, Chuck (Anna Friel); they fall in love but can never touch. And they solve murders! (The return episode spends about seven minutes re-explaining the premise...
...Daisies' fairy-tale story is so unlike anything else on TV that it seems new even a year later. Unveiling one dazzling image after another (Chuck is a beekeeper, and when her colony fails, she pours a bucket of bees over Ned; they return to life in a shower of sparks), Daisies has a timeless, picture-book look. It could be set today, in the '30s, in the '70s or in any other decade fond of saturated color. Like Chuck herself, it's a perfect candidate for a second chance: as glowing and lovable as the day we first...