Snark Attack: “Spy Vs. Spy”

Imagine, if you will, that you are a terrifying, all-powerful supervillain bent on ruling the world.

Let’s call you … Blowfellow.

And let’s say that, much like Michael Jensen, you control an army of soulless automatons (AKA “bloggers”) available to carry out your evil bidding. They’ve already earned you a billion dollars (mainly by searching sofas and movie theater floors for spare change), and now you’ve been able to complete work on your doomsday device.

Trapped inside the device’s bullet-proof glass chamber is none other than Bond himself. As in Bond, James Bond. You press a button and a powerful laser sears through the chamber splitting Bond into two. You might think you’d have to run and get a mop, what with the steaming pile of 007 guts you’re left with. But no, you’re much more diabolical than that.

You haven’t split Bond in half …you’ve split him into two distinctive personae. Instead of one 007, you’ve now got two 003.5’s, and each one carries half of the famed super-spy’s most noteworthy traits. One of them has all of the character’s odd little quirks … his fondness for card games, his need to get his hands on whatever’s the hot new gadget, his tendency to resort to snarky one-liners while being beaten senseless, his fussiness over his drink orders.

In other words, this James Bond is a big nerd.

The other Bond you’ve created has all the other traits … his athleticism and drive to win at all costs, his rampant egomania, his meterosexual-like fastidiousness about his personal grooming, his male-whore compulsion to bed every woman he comes into contact with.

This Bond, rather than a nerd, is your run of the mill straight male asshat.

When you step back and take a look at them side by side, you realize that what you’ve really created is two current TV shows that each in their own way spoof the James Bond spy genre. You’ve got yourself a Chuck on the one hand, and an Archer on the other.

Chuck premiered in 2007, the same year as Reaper, a show that bore more than a passing resemblance to it. Both shows initially focused on charmingly dorky main characters stuck in dead-end jobs at mega-consumer chains, who suddenly find themselves empowered to battle evil.

This similarity points to the prevalence of a certain creative strategy that I mentioned a few weeks ago in my column on V – the empowerment of central nerd characters as a means of sucking up to a particular show’s fan base (or at least the fan base that networks and advertisers seem so desperate to win over -- I guess geeks buy a lot of pricey stuff).

But I think there’s something deeper going on here that accounts for the appeal of these shows’ central conceits. They speak to our desire to have something unforeseen but fantastic happen to us, a life-changing event that provides an escape from the mundane nature of our daily lives, and particularly, of the modern workplace.

I don’t work in a Home Depot or a Best Buy, the clear workplace inspirations for Reaper and Chuck respectively. But I do work in an all-gray cubicle farm that the higher-ups optimistically describe as an “open environment” designed to “promote inter-personal communication” and “inspire free thinking.” In reality, this atmosphere “promotes irritability” and “inspires an overwhelming urge to nap.” (It says something when the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in my office is a collective bout of mass vomiting resulting from bad Christmas party sushi.)

So there are days when, staring at the all-gray burlap walls and listening to the deadening tock of the clock, I can see the appeal of ninja assassins suddenly storming the water cooler, or a widening hell-mouth spewing forth demons in the pantry. Chuck and Reaper bring those desires vividly to life.

As clever and well reviewed as both these shows originally were, only one of them proved to have staying power. And it wasn’t the one I chose to make part of my regular weekly TV viewing.

I have strict rules about not watching too many shows with the same premise, much like the limitation I have on how many shows I’ll watch starring former Friends cast mates. Reaper aired first, I stuck with it, and in the long-term, it was the wrong decision, given it had a so-so first season followed by a much-improved second season that was also its last.

Chuck, meanwhile, has made it to a fourth season, in large part due to a cult-like fan base who performed the near-impossible feat of getting a major network to save a beloved show rather than face their wraith. So even though I’d never seen an episode myself, before this week, I knew that at a bare minimum, I liked the people who liked watching it. I identify with that kind of extreme TV fandom/activism, even though it hardly helped with my own beloved Freaks & Geeks and Veronica Mars.

When it won last week’s Snark Attack poll, I was pleasantly surprised, because it finally gave me an opportunity to check out what’s up with Chuck myself. Also, I was curious about certain elements of the casting …