The Making of Chuck
A retrospective with the creators of Chuck
Introduction
Throughout the five seasons of Chuck there were multiple interviews by various journalists with the shows creators, Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz. We will organise and combine those interviews, editing for clarity as well as brevity. We will cover the content as it relates to the seasons, characters and storylines that we are all familiar with.
Every Chuck fan has their own interpretation of what they have seen and heard with the 91 episodes of the show. The purpose of this is to pass on what the creators of the show thought and shared regarding their intent.
This can be a controversial subject with Chuck fans, many of whom don’t wish to know what Fedak and Schwartz thought. If you count yourself in that group then this is not the information for you. If, like me, you care about what the creative team intended then read on.
There will be a reference to each interview and a list at the end citing all the interviews. Some are written and others are video interviews. All were reviewed multiple times for as much accuracy as possible. I admit to my own bias regarding my thoughts on many of the more controversial topics covered. The whole point of this is to further encourage Chuck fans to enjoy the show we all love.
The Beginning/ Season 1
thefutoncritic.com published an interview on the date the first episode aired, January 24, 2007. Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz went to film school together at USC, with Chris being a year ahead of Josh. During season four of The O.C .Schwartz was looking for a new project and saw a script Fedak had written (gladiator story) that he liked and they had a meeting. Schwartz asked Fedak if he had any ideas for a TV show and Chris pitched the concept for ‘Chuck’ which he created after watching The O.C. and wondered if comedy and action based in a workplace would fly. Josh liked it and wanted to do a quarter-life crisis show so they had a spy show that had personal issues including comedy and romance.
They began creating the concept January of 2006 and a year later were shooting the second episode. It came together really quickly. As big fans of ‘The Office’ they worked the office-based comedy angle in with the Buy More. Early on they envisioned a villain or mission of the week concept as the main part of the story and seemed to know that a high-concept show like Chuck was very different.
The casting was another challenge. Casting Chuck with a nerd that a sophisticated spy could fall for ….. well, they say it best themselves in an interview done before season four.
”It was even harder than Chuck and Morgan’s search for Chuck’s mom,” Schwartz said, laughing. “It didn’t take us to quite as many countries, although close. It was really challenging. I mean, obviously, you know, we wanted to be able to … obviously Seth Cohen (The OC) was part of what we talked about, but we also wanted this guy to feel like his own character, and a man, you know? And we really wanted someone you could believe would be cowering on his birthday instead of wanting to go out and face people … his life hadn’t come together … but who, if given the opportunity and the right-fitting tuxedo, could also make that transformation and would be believable as a spy, as well, albeit a spy that spent a lot of time in the first couple of seasons hiding under tables to avoid getting hurt.
“And when (Zach) came in and read, it was instant. It was just like, here’s a guy that can hit every note, play all those different colors, who you believe is nerdy, but you also can see someone who drop-dead-gorgeous Sarah Walker is falling for over time, and, you know, just the whole package.”
Zachary Levi was cast first, followed by Adam Baldwin, both in February 2007. Yvonne Strahovski was also cast that month. Sarah Lancaster, Joshua Gomez and Natalie Martinez were cast in March 2007. Natalie Martinez was cast in the role of Kayla Hart, a character cut from the show soon after production began.
During thefutoncritic.com interview it was revealed that the ninja who breaks into Chuck’s apartment in the pilot is a stuntman and not Yvonne Strahovski or her stuntwoman double.
A retrospective interview published on uproxx.com covered all the seasons of Chuck. Their inspiration for the show was Fedak proposing what would happen if Jack Bauer wandered into The Office and took Jim along on the adventure. Fedak had a background in writing features and Schwartz knew how to work on TV, they both loved 80’s pop culture. The show grew from their thoughts with those core ideas.
They made lists of their favorite movies, tv shows and music from the 80’s with lots of common ground around Fedak leaning toward action and Schwartz with the background in teen stories (The OC). Hitchcock played a big part in Fedak’s thinking and the ‘Hitchcock blond’ came about because an original romantic interest written for Chuck, the character named Kayla, was written out after Yvonne Strahovski was cast as Sarah and Kayla was redundant as a love interest. Fedak later said, “Kayla was lost from the pilot because we don’t want to see Zac with anyone else (but Yvonne).”
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They had already filmed part of the pilot with Kayla in the story and had to cut it when Sarah (Strahovski) was obviously going to be the one for Chuck. They knew from the moment they saw Chuck and Sarah together that they would be the heart of the show. They mentioned both Almost Famous and High Fidelity as inspirations for building Chuck’s romantic story. Kayla was inspired by Almost Famous and character of Jill Roberts comes from the character of Charlie in the film High Fidelity.
The characters of Jeff and Lester were expanded after making the pilot, when they saw how good Scott Krinsky and Vic Sahay were. Harry Tang was to be a big part of the Buy More story until the actor was cast in ‘Dexter’.
Casey was always part of the plan, Casey and Sarah were in the style of ‘My Two Dads’ but as serious spies. The evolution of the concept for the show moved quickly with Fedak and Schwartz pitching the idea to Warner Bros and the pilot being filmed completely location in Los Angeles. The apartment used for Chuck and Ellie’s home was located in Hollywood in the El Cabrillo apartment complex, built by Cecil B DeMille in 1928 and a historical landmark. The Buy More was played by an area Comp USA store that was going out of business. (see location information on our location page)
After being picked up by NBC, the sets for Chuck were built primarily on stages 10 and 17 at the Warner Bros lot and they were able to build out the Buy More the way they wanted it.
Chris Fedak came up with the idea of ‘Chuck vs’ for the titles of the episodes after he named the second episode Chuck vs the Helicopter. The original concept was to do a mission of the week type story with the focus on action and comedy but after they watched Helicopter they felt that was not the right tone or direction for the show. It seemed obvious to them that the characters and their relationships had to be the focus. With Chuck vs the Tango they began the process of shifting the tone to Chuck and Sarah with their family and friends.
Morgan Grimes, as played by Josh Gomez, was designed as part of the comedy relief for the show. As the first season developed the fan reaction to Morgan was not what they had hoped. Fans of the show disliked Morgan, believing his behaviour to be creepy, stalker-like and interfering with Chuck and Sarah. Season one was halted by the writers strike in 2007, before they were able to finish the season. As a result the first thirteen episodes were all that they had for the first year. During the break caused by the strike, they decided to retool Morgan, he would be more like Alfred to Chuck’s Batman.
Chuck receiving the intersect from Bryce was originally intended to be a mistake. Chuck and CIA were right next to each other on his PDA device and he accidentally sent it to Chuck instead of the CIA. Their minds were changed when they decided to build the show out as a character driven, family story with a mythology. Working through the first season they settled on the idea that Bryce did it on purpose.
By the time they got to Chuck vs the Alma Mater they realised they needed to build a mythology for the show and characters. It couldn’t be a mission-a-week format.
“The heart of the show is the characters and what our cast does with them”- Chris Fedak
The original plan was for Intersect 2.0 to be what ended the first season but all those plans had to be changed with the writer’s strike. They wanted season one to end on a ‘save the day or run away’ decision. As will be discussed later on, many changes had to be made to plot development as a result of the strike in the first season and the threat of cancellation with all the ensuing seasons. The Jill Roberts storyline was also intended to be part of the first season.
What became obvious to Fedak and Schwartz was that Sarah Walker was the perfect example of someone who had their professional life in order but no personal life to speak of. Chuck, on the other hand, had a rich and satisfying personal life with his family and friends but his professional life was a dead end. The point being that each admires the others strengths and strives to develop that other part of their lives. Both had good reasons for being who they were but their relative strengths really matched with the others weaknesses. Two tv shows intersect, The Office meets Jack Bauer.
They were excited to develop something very different, a hybrid. Combining different genres into something that hadn’t been done before. The idea of Chuck as a fish out of water was jettisoned when it became clear it should be about the nerd who gets the girl.
Devon Woodcomb, aka Captain Awesome, was originally intended to be a villain and only part of the pilot but everyone loved Ryan McPartlin and he was so good in the role that they decided to make him permanent. Schwartz relays that the first time they heard him say ‘Awesome’ they were sold. The character was also a big hit when the pilot was screened at San Diego Comic Con in July 2007. In their interview on January of 2012, Fedak and Schwartz names Chuck vs the Nemesis (their Thanksgiving episode) as the episode they felt best represented what they wanted season one to showcase. It is also, along with Chuck vs the Imported Hard Salami, the first story arc of the show.
The Intersect flash in the pilot was originally designed to parallel an album of music. The first pic (apple pie) was the album cover and the other photos represented the data and then they finished with the album cover again. The flash would be different for each mission and each would have a different album cover. That concept did not last but it is obvious from those first flashes that the badass spy, Sarah Walker, is represented by a hummingbird.
After the writer’s strike began in November of 2007, only the episodes completed by that time could be filmed and produced. Chuck vs the Alma Mater aired the day the strike began. Episodes 8-13 had been written and some already filmed. The remaining episodes of season one were then incorporated into the story plan for season two. The last two episodes of the season had no writer input as they were produced after the strike began. The strike was settled in February of 2008 but the show had already been wrapped by that time.
The graphic novel of Chuck was written by executive producer Peter Johnson and series writer Zev Borow with art by Jeremy Haun and Phil Noto. It was written between seasons one and two of the show. The story line covers Team Bartowski fighting against many bad guys in order to help President Obama (he had not even run for President at this point). There were originally six separate issues but it is also available combined into one.
The idea was to take Chuck and team out of the Buy More and have them fighting bad guys around the globe. It was published by the same publisher, Wildstorm (a DC comic imprint), that produced Ex Machina, the comic Chuck is reading to hid his Intersect study in Chuck vs the Predator.
Interesting to get the creators’ ideas (and evolution) for the show’s early direction. They definitely made the correct choice in focusing on characters and relationships. That is the heart of the show, and it carried through to the very last scene! I hope they eventually get to make a movie (or movies) to keep the storyline going! Chuck and Sarah deserve a happily-ever-after…