So the folks out at Warner Brothers sent me a copy of Chuck: The Complete Third Season to review, and I was skeptical at first. Indeed, I’d heard about Chuck’s misadventures before, and regarded the dubious romantic spy thriller comedy as a case of too many cooks making a really godawful broth. But after settling in with it, I discovered that it may be a little complicated, but it’ll turn out surprisingly well.

Chuck follows the titular Chuck, a thoroughly nerdy employee out at Buy More, a Best Buy analogue to the eyes. It’s so much an analogue that they even feature their own mobile squad of techies, the “Nerd Herd”, whom Chuck is part of. But when Chuck inadvertently absorbs the contents of a massive supercomputer known as the Intersect, he finds himself part of the CIA, as they attempt to get him to develop his newfound skills and knowledge so they can be used.

This, the third season, is actually the result of a massive online campaign known simply as “Save Chuck”, and considering that the fourth season starts September 20th, it’s clear that it worked. And there’s a reason–Chuck is actually pretty good.

Like I said before, I thought they were going to be trying too hard to do too much. But as it turns out, they managed to blend just enough of everything together to make it worthwhile. Much like Shaun of the Dead, there’s just enough rom-com in here to make the spy thriller less a standard spy thriller and more a highly unconventional treat.

I’m not normally inclined to enjoy network television–I’ve railed against the heap of heavily-edited, unoriginal sludge for long enough to make that position thoroughly, crystalline clear–but sometimes there’s a little bit of nifty that slips out. Like a broken clock that’s right twice a day, Chuck is one of those strange events that is even better for its sheer novelty. This is good network television. That by itself is almost an impossibility, but tack that on to the quality of the show itself and you get a double surprise.

Oh, and the pun I used in the title?  Actually taken from the first five minutes of the DVD set.  It really worked here.

And the Screenhead Ten Scale joins in my accolades by handing this nice dose of funny spy thriller a seven out of ten; it may not be the greatest thing ever but it’ll be the best of a distinctly bad lot. And that, these days, means plenty.