Ugly Betty and Chuck

Hello there. These days the box set rules. I’ll watch the first episode of a show when it airs on TV and then if I like it wait for the box set to come out. I can’t deal with the week to week having to follow the plots and who is who. I want it all in one huge hour after hour; fill your day with nothing else, bombardment. Apart from Game of Thrones for some reason, I’ve been watching that as it airs. No clue as to why I single that show out for special treatment.

But onto what I want to talk about today, Ugly Betty and Chuck. I doubt there are many people out there who watch both or are fans of both. If you are let me know I’m not alone. I do love one more than the other and just because I’m talking about them today doesn’t mean they are my favourite shows of all time. That honour goes to Doctor Who.

But I’ve finished the full season box sets of both shows this past couple of weeks and thought I would talk about both. For some crazy reason of which I’m not yet sure of.

Ugly Betty, in case you don’t know, is about a young woman tricked into working at a fashion magazine. The reason for this is because the head of the company doesn’t want his son to sleep with his assistant like he has done time and time again. So hire the ‘ugly’ girl so the temptation isn’t there. What follows is the most marvellously camp show until Glee came along. Which is another show I strongly like.

I doubt anyone who dismissed the show would really know how much it’s about murders, death, kidnappings and more murders.  One storyline is all about stealing sperm from a corpse. You don’t see that on TV everyday of the week. It’s about heart and family too of course. With any long running show some storylines drag and you wish them to be over already, but that is the joy of the box set.

Which bring me to my next choice, Chuck. Right this is the main idea, a dopey guy who works in an electrical store gets a secret er….(weapon?) something beamed into his brain because of reasons.

It is daft, high class daft. But sadly is seems to me to be very stuck in the 1980s. What with the Tron posters and the guest stars who all have worked very little since that decade. A few stars come from other genre shows too. Some weeks it’s a game of ‘oh look it’s thingy from they thing back in the day’.  Also it’s as if they wanted to make Alias but didn’t have the same budget. Alias is a far better show.

As with Ugly Betty this show had a hard time at the hands of the network runners. And it was only fans that brought it back from the dead a couple of times. But in some of the later seasons I sat thinking it’s a show that should have died sooner.  Some episodes seem to go over old storylines time and time again and drag at a snails pace. Then it picks up towards the end. It needed a stronger arc to keep the audience interested. Tent poling a show with guest stars isn’t the way to go. It keeps an audience amused for seconds as they smile at who the star is but it can’t make up for weak stories and run of the mill TV. You will be asking yourself why I would still tell people to watch this show after all that? I’m just one person. It’s just my thoughts. Give it a go and see if I’m right or wrong.