Good night, good luck and so long, 'Chuck'
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Yvonne Strahovski, Zachary Levi and Adam Baldwin will have their final hurrah on "Chuck" tonight.
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It's a busy weekend in TV land with an unusually full Friday night of new programming. Tonight marks the season premiere of "Spartacus: Vengeance" (10 p.m., Starz), reviewed this past Sunday in TV Week; the series finale of "Chuck" (8 p.m., NBC) and PBS's "Great Performances" debut of "Tony Bennett: Duets II" (9 p.m., WQED-TV).
Add in Sunday's premiere of HBO's "Luck" (9 p.m.), opposite a new episode of CBS's finally-free-of-football-delays "The Good Wife," and your DVR may start emitting steam from working overtime.
NBC's "Chuck" had one of the most topsy-turvy runs in TV history. Perpetually low-rated, the show, about a nerdy electronics salesman (Zachary Levi) who becomes a government secret agent, always seemed to be on the cusp of cancellation.
"The benefit of being on the bubble was that we told a lot of story," said executive producer Chris Fedak in a teleconference with reporters this week. "We never held anything. We always were ready to throw the kitchen sink into the story because we didn't know if we were going to be coming back for another season."
Assorted efforts by fans and advocates managed to stave off cancellation with a variety of campaigns (most famously, one involving Subway sandwiches), but producers often wrote their season finales unsure whether they also would be series finales.
"Well, hopefully I've gotten good at it," Mr. Fedak joked.
This time, producers knew going in that the show's fifth season would be its last. Mr. Fedak said producers devised the show's final moment a year ago as part of their pitch to NBC executives for one last season.
"[Past season finales] we wrote in such a way that they implied a big new season coming next year or in a few weeks," Mr. Fedak said. "And this time we knew that this was going to be our final episode. ... When we started working on the finale, it was much more like this will be the final chapter. This will be the final moment of this show, and we need to resolve these stories that we've been working on for five seasons now."
He described writing the last episodes -- "Chuck Versus Sarah" at 8 tonight, which brings closure to fifth-season stories, and "Chuck Versus the Goodbye" at 9, which wraps up the series -- as "a panic attack on a daily basis.
"Knowing the size and the scope of five seasons of the show, there were many days where it was hard to even look at the board in the writers' room and then to consider the page," Mr. Fedak said. "But it was something that I think that when we finally cracked the story ... it was a big moment and there was a lot of emotion involved in a process that's usually pretty solitary."
Series regular Adam Baldwin ("Firefly"), who plays grunt-prone Col. John Casey, said the "Chuck" set filled with waterworks during production of the last episode.
"There were a lot of tears, a lot of emotion," he said. "I didn't cry, but I watched a lot of other of the younger people cry, being a cold-hearted bastard that I am. It was uplifting and bittersweet, and yet it was a sense of accomplishment because we had against all odds persevered and been lucky enough and had the good graces of the network and the sponsors to keep us going. We made it five years when we didn't even think we were going to make it past the first season, let alone get picked up as a pilot."
PBS's "Great Performances" goes behind the scenes as Tony Bennett records his album "Duets II," which includes a final recorded performance by Amy Winehouse, who also is interviewed.
Mr. Bennett said he was surprised Ms. Winehouse had any interest in singing with him. They met when he was performing at Royal Albert Hall in London.
"She said, 'You know, two years ago I won a Grammy and I wasn't excited about winning the Grammy, but I was excited that Tony Bennett announced it,' " he said at a PBS press conference earlier this month in Pasadena, Calif. "She was a big fan of mine, and I was very surprised because she's so young."
Then he realized her singing style took after greats of the past.
"She just had the gift of knowing how to sing as good as, and was influenced by, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and her dream was to become very, very famous doing that," he said.
In "Duets II," the 85-year-old Mr. Bennett is also joined by Lady Gaga on "The Lady Is a Tramp," Michael Buble on "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," k.d. lang on "Blue Velvet," Aretha Franklin on "How Do You Keep the Music Playing" and Natalie Cole on "Watch What Happens" among others.
A "Luck" review runs Sunday in the Post-Gazette's TV Week, but just knowing this new series about horse racing and gambling comes from writer David Milch ("Deadwood") and director Michael Mann ("Heat," "The Last of the Mohicans") suggests it probably won't be easy TV.
"Luck" is the kind of show you have to pay attention to -- no reading a magazine while this show is on -- and even attentive viewers who aren't familiar with the race track-gambling world may be confused. Mr. Milch does not spell out everything in his scripts; he drops viewers into the world and expects them to fend for themselves.
"It's an act of faith," Mr. Milch said at an HBO press conference earlier this month in Pasadena, Calif. "And I think your fundamental responsibility is to stay true to the deepest nature and intention of the materials. And that's what we did, and I have to say that Michael's work ... took a tremendous amount of the burden off of the demystifying of the world."
Mr. Mann said his job as director was to find a visual way to make the gambling terminology understood, including the notion of a "pick six" wager -- requiring bettors to pick the winners of six races -- that's featured in Sunday's pilot episode.
"One of the big complexities ... was how to communicate to a mass audience what, for example, the 'pick six' is," he said. "If they could understand the one thing that a man's made a one-out-six selection, one horse, and they just had that concept that that No. 5 horse was going to be good news for them. So we went into a simple graphic comprehension. To this day, I don't think I know how to bet a pick six."
"Luck" follows a large cast of characters, including a veteran horse trainer played by Nick Nolte and a recently paroled, calculating schemer played by Dustin Hoffman.
A "Luck" preview aired in December after the "Boardwalk Empire" season finale, and the same episode airs Sunday. The show's second episode will be available at 9 p.m. Sunday via HBO GO, a service for HBO subscribers that makes programming available on a desktop computer, iPad or smart phone. Episode two also will be available early via HBO On Demand through select providers, including Verizon's FiOS TV and Comcast's Xfinity On Demand.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported last week that HBO's "Treme," which usually has a spring start, won't air until fall this year. ... Deadline.com reports NBC is developing a spinoff of "The Office" that would follow Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) as he leaves Dunder Mifflin to run the bed and breakfast at his family's beet farm. ... News Corp., parent company of Fox, plans to launch a Spanish-language broadcast network, MundoFox, this fall as a competitor to Univision and Telemundo. ... CMT has renewed "The Singing Bee" for a fourth season. ... "Exporting Raymond," a documentary about "Everybody Loves Raymond" executive producer Phil Rosenthal trying to launch a Russian version of "Raymond," will air at 8 p.m. Feb. 16 on HBO. ... Saturday at 9 HBO debuts "Namath," a 90-minute documentary about the life and career of NFL quarterback Joe Namath, beginning with his high school days in Beaver Falls. ... Following on the heels of Idris Elba's best actor win at the 2012 Golden Globes, BBC America announced Thursday it will co-produce another four-part "Luther" miniseries to air later this year. ... On Feb. 11 A&E brings back "Parking Wars" (9 and 9:30 p.m.) and "Billy the Exterminator" (10 and 10:30 p.m.). ... Daytime TV aficionados, mark your calendars: Star Jones, an original co-host of "The View," has been booked for a guest spot on the show Feb. 22, her first visit back since announcing her departure from the program in 2006. ... Last summer Animal Planet launched "Hillybilly Hand Fishin'," about Oklahomans who catch catfish with their bare hands and feet. Not to be outdone, History debuts "Mudfish" at 10 p.m. Feb. 9, which sounds like the exact same show. ... Fox's "American Idol" is now available via on demand to Comcast's Xfinity customers for three days beginning the day after it airs. ... WQED's "4802" (7:30 p.m. Fridays) will devote episodes airing the last Friday of the month, beginning tonight, to the 2012 presidential election. Tonight's topic: the economy.
Today's TV Q&A column responds to questions about "Spartacus," "Deadliest Catch" and "Today." This week's Tuned In Journal includes posts on how the TV business works, "CSI" and "Finding Bigfoot." Read online-only TV content at www.post-gazette.com/tv .
This week's podcast includes conversation about "House of Lies," "Being Human" and "Chuck." Subscribe or listen at www.post-gazette.com/podcast .
First Published January 27, 2012 12:00 am
