Show Cut from similar cloth Robert Lloyd Los Angeles Times In a universe in which nothing is really ever created or destroyed there are only so many stories to tell you can switch the atoms around but most everything will look like something youve you've seen before This week sees the premiere of two series so structurally alike they might have been created from the same Mad Libs page Chuck which premieres Monday on NBC and Reaper which comes Tuesday on the CW each concern a young underachiever working in a box big-box store who through extraordinary circumstances finds himself personally transformed and thrown into a life of danger and intrigue In each show there is a wacky bearded y slacker-y sidekick and a woman of great beauty and intelligence whom our late- late blooming awkward but we can see attractive hero suspects is out of his league eague Each is a romantic comedy of self-actualization self with fight scenes Usually such similitude is a cue to discuss the lack of imagination in the TV business but the fact is both these shows are really fine and funny different enough in tone for each to seem original yet appealing to the same pleasure centers in the brain Their DNA shows common traces of Spiderman geek empowered by natural extra-natural forces and Hitchcock regular guy swept up in extraordinary drama but also of Frank Capra and Preston t J Sturges In Chuck Zachary Levi Less Than Perfect plays the title character who has risen in life so far as asto asto asto to lead the troubleshooting Nerd Herd at an electronics store called Buy More One fin fine day he receives an mail e-mail from an old pal that via some impossible science and keen special effects implants the entire combined contents of the national intelligence services supercomputers into his brain Sarah Yvonne and Casey Adam Baldwin still the standard gold-standard in lantern-jawed lantern creepiness play mutually distrustful agents of the CIA and who are assigned to watch over Chuck and direct his newfound power manages to be soft enough for us to regard her as a potential girlfriend for Chuck yet tough enough to sell the spy stuff she's Grace Kelly to his Cary Gary Grant the Jean Arthur to to his Jimmy Stewart Joshua Gomez is the wacky bearded sidekick The pilot is an especially persuasive hour of action- action adventure but later lower- lower budget episodes preserve the esprit and suspense creator Co-creator Co Josh Schwartz was also responsible for The OC and this seasons season's Gossip Girl A more acute critic than I might be able to discern the aesthetic kinship Reaper creators Michele and Tara Butters worked together on The X Files and Ed Ed and in tone and premise their new show falls somewhere in between the two Here the box big-box store is called the Work Bench and our hero is Sam Brett Harrison c The Loop An ordinary lost soul who quit college after a month because it made him sleepy he learns leams on his 21 st birthday that before he was born his parents sold his soul to the Devil I wont won't explain the mechanics of this but its it's arranged in such sucha a way as to keep his folks sympathetic and it helps that the Devil Ray Wise from Twin Peaks and 24 when he suddenly appears in the backseat of Sams Sam's car doesn't seem like such a bad guy himself more mentor than menace In a premise that nearly replicates that of the 1998 Peter Horton series Brimstone Sam Samis is set to work retrieving souls escaped from Hell whose gates have become penetrable with the overcrowding and so forth Missy Heroes is the so-far- so just friend potential love interest Tyler Labine a most excellent wacky bearded sidekick Rick Gonzalez and Valarie Rae Miller round out the Gang of Kevin Smith Clerks directed the pilot which maintains a anice anice anice nice fairy tale tone even as asit asit asit it stresses the banality of the infernal Awkward young men also form fonn the core of Big Bang Theory which begins Monday on CBS with Back to You one of only two new three- three camera comedies tm's this season Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons play playa a pair of socially inept physicists who get a perky blond new neighbor in the person of waitress Kaley Cuoco |