With all the recent cancellations of shows —
Southland, Eastwick, Dollhouse — it’s time for some good news to come from TV-land. One of the favorite shows among our staffers is
Chuck, the NBC action comedy starring Zachary Levi as a mild-mannered nerd-turned-spy. It just avoided the Grim Reaper last spring to be picked up for its third season, and is tentatively scheduled to come back in March. Not so fast, though, because there’s a rumor that
Chuck may return as early as January. Our Brian Truitt caught up with Levi yesterday for a feature in the magazine next month pegged to his upcoming role in
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, and wanted to get the early premiere scoop from Chuck himself. “Yeah, that’s a pretty solid rumor,” Levi says, taking a break from the editing bay after wrapping an episode of
Chuck that he directed (which will be the ninth of the next season). Read below for more of what Brian found out from Levi, including some hints about
Chuck’s upcoming season.
Levi says that there was a feeling among cast and crew that NBC might start airing the new season this month or next, but he thinks that scrapped that plan because there wouldn’t be enough time for promotion. “You don’t want to just launch something half-baked, which I appreciate,” Levi says. “Also, you don’t want to run like four episodes and then be down for the whole holiday season. That’s what’s happened to us the last couple of years. There have been certain things that have preempted our schedule, it gets a little herky-jerky and people can’t fall into a rhythm with your show.”
Levi admits that even a January launch could be problematic, since NBC will be airing the Winter Olympics a couple weeks in February. If that happens, Levi says, “they’re going to double up on some episodes – they’ll air two in a row for a premiere or something like that, so we’ll get a good chunk of them out of the way and get people really rolling with the show and then only be down for a couple weeks before coming back for the rest of the season.”And it’s a longer season than they initially thought: NBC originally asked for a 13-episode third season, and then ordered six more. That turned out to be a positive for
Chuck but a negative for director Kenneth Branagh’s movie
Thor, which starts filming in January. Levi was cast as Fandral, one of Thor’s Warriors Three in the comic book adaptation, and the actor had even been working out especially for the role, but had to walk away when they got the extra pickup. (Levi admits that producers had asked him to audition for the role of the usually beefy God of Thunder, but told them no. “I’m tall and in pretty good shape, but I’m not big and girthy like that,” he says.)
Maybe all that working out will help when he shares screen time with former wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, one of many guest stars on Chuck’s third season. Levi says that Brandon Routh (Superman Returns) appears in approximately eight episodes, and Kristen Kreuk (Smallville) will be in three. Diedrich Bader (of The Drew Carey Show) and former Reno: 911 star Cedric Yarbrough will guest on the episode that Levi directs.The last time we saw Chuck in the second season finale, he had had the new Intersect 2.0 downloaded into his brain, taken down a bunch of bad guys and uttered the phrase “I know kung fu.” Levi reveals that the character will see a lot of growth and change this season, continuing his tenuous (and maybe not so tenuous, he teases) romantic relationship with super-spy Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) and getting used to the new thing in his noggin.
“This new Intersect 2.0 grants Chuck the ability to have physical powers of sorts, whether it be kung fu or playing a musical instrument or maneuvering a vehicle of some kind,” Levi says. “But it’s glitchy. It’s not a perfect system because it was meant for a cool, collected, calm, in-control spy who’s on top of his emotions, and unfortunately Chuck is not that guy. He’s still an emotional guy. That starts messing with the new Intersect’s ability to perform. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But he still is the unwilling, unwitting hero, and he still needs the assistance of his team – he can’t just go out there and take on a bunch of baddies all by himself.”
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