History trells us if you launch three shows about mysterious alien objects appearing in the water and a team of people trying to discover what they are - Threshold, Invasion, Surface - they will split the concept and the audience. And if you have two shows about the behind the scenes antics at a late night sketch comedy show - 30 Rock, Studio 60 - one will fail and the other will have low ratings but win an Emmy. Going back further, if you have two novels about a skyscraper fire - The Tower, the Inferno - what you out to do is merge them and make one big movie.

So obviously if you have two shows about a young geek with a slacker best friend who works in tech support at a big box store, they will get compared. "Chuck's" advantage is that it's on NBC right before Heroes with nothing good on opposite except the Doogie and Willow show. "Reaper's" disadvantage is that it's on a part time baby network opposite some better shows. So I can't call who wins and who dies - advantage Chuck, but Reapers the better show - but do you think both will last until next year?

But having grown up in the '60s, I like espionage and spy-spoof shows. I liked The Avengers, Man from UNCLE, Get Smart, I-Spy, Dangerman-Secret Agent-The Prisoner, and the Matt Helm and Derek Flint movies - all the shows that spoofed the Bond franchise that didn't take it self overly serious to begin with. More recently we had la Femme Nikita, Alias and She-Spies. Chuck is another of that basic genre, in spite of the minor sci-fi elements and comedic trappings. sort of "Alias' meets "Jake 2.0". A fish out of water show like those movies where Billy Crystal analyzes a gangster or Chandler Bing marries a hitmans daughter or whatever. If people give Chuck a chance based on what it is, not what it's not (hard sci-fi/fantasy, serious espionage or "Reaper") they may wind up enjoying it.

Reaper is encored on Thursday nights, so it may well last a while--clearly CW does not have a lot of content to fill its slots, so even if Reaper does not snare a big audience, CW has nothing else. I liked Reaper, too so far, though I give the edge to Chuck based on the first episodes.

Hopefully, Reaper will avoid crawling up its own ass and dying. The cast is more appealing, but the writing will tell the tale. (No pun intended.)

And that fight scene in the snack bar was a lot of fun. Sydney Bristow once killed a man whille bound to a chair, but I never saw her in a corn-dog skewer vs. plastic fork duel.

The problem seems to be that Zack Levy is still just a little bit Kip from "Less Than Perfect". If he could just reel the goofy expressions in by at least half, maybe that would help.

Geek guy gets show with trank gun and is saved when the dart his his official nerd plastic pocket protector... ehh, that's just crappy writing to stereotypes. Him repeating to himself the mantra "just stay in the car, stay in the car..." and then not staying in the car... ehhh... Liked him knowing how to barely survive a helicoptor landing from having played flight simulator video games though. I might write that...

perfect!

Lovin g this series so far--the three main characters are great, well cast, and this show is just a lot of fun. I just hope there is one scene where we learn that Baldwin has named his "very favorite gun": Vera.

Oh, and Jeff Bridges as a washed-out former gymnast, too.

It did, however, drop nearly a million viewers from last week, so I'm sticking with my prediction that this show dosen't make it out of October