NBC"Chuck?" "Yeah?" "Kiss me."
It's been about three and a half years since that exchange ended a beloved NBC series, and we haven't stopped thinking about it ever since.
Chuck—the quirky dramedy about a guy with a government computer in his brain that ran from 2007 to 2012—dedicated five years to telling the story of Chuck (Zachary Levi) and Sarah's (Yvonne Strahovski) romance, only to sort of crush us all at the end by having Sarah's entire memory of her time with Chuck completely erased.
The last scene of the show gave us a little bit of hope by having Sarah ask Chuck to kiss her, hoping that magical kiss would restore her memory, but we never got to see if that classic fairy tale trope actually worked.
Of course, Chuck was always an optimistic series, so we assumed the kiss worked, but we never had confirmation…until now.
When we sat down with Craig DiGregorio, showrunner of the new Ash Vs. Evil Dead series on Starz, we ended our Evil Dead-related talk by casually asking his thoughts on the ending of Chuck, which he was a writer and producer on for the last couple of seasons.
"I always want to take away the best possible ending from a show, the one that makes you feel good," DieGregorio said, before saying he wasn't really the one to answer such a question.
Instead, he texted the show's creator, Chris Fedak, who first responded with a big fat, "No."
After letting us ruminate on that cruel heartbreak for a few minutes, Fedak followed up.
"Oh, he said ‘I'm kidding, they're still together with kids!'" DiGregorio told us joyfully, turning our sad watery eyes to happy watery eyes, as Rivers and Roads started playing in our head.
(Digregorio may have texted back at this point that the reporter from E! was now on the verge of tears, but we officially admit to nothing.)
Armed with the news that Chuck and Sarah lived happily ever after, we then managed to ask Zachary Levi, who was attending NBC's summer press tour to promote Heroes Reborn, about his (and our) dream of a Chuck movie.
"There are a lot of shows that I don't know that they would necessarily be conducive to doing more iterations of what they are, but Chuck is one hundred percent," Levi told a small group of reporters after the Heroes Reborn panel. "Every episode was a little mini-movie, and he was always this kind of quirky James Bond-ian, you know. We had a misson of the week, we had a bad guy, we had to save the world, you know."
Levi isn't even just setting his sights on one Chuck movie.
"I think doing, like, a two-hour movie every couple years or every year or whatever just to get the gang back together, even just for ourselves selfishly would be a lot of fun," he said. "But I know the Chuck fanbase would really love to have those little check-ins."
We don't know about you, but it feels like kind of perfect timing for some Chuck news. Not only are there roughly a thousand other shows currently being rebooted or revived in one way or another, but Chuck has had just enough time to grow a whole new audience since being added to Netflix in 2013.
According to Levi, however, that may be an audience whose relationship with the show is a little bit lacking.
"Binge-watching has incredible pros and incredible cons," Levi said. "With Chuck, we have a whole new generation of viewers, and I'm so grateful that we have these viewers who are binging Chuck. However, one of the things we miss out on as viewers in this audience is that when things are a weekly check-in, you get to consume that episode kind of in itself."
"Now, you watch a whole season of something, and you don't get to spend the individual time to really dissect individual episodes, but moreover, you don't get as close to the characters," Levi continued. "The Chuck fans we had that started with us from season one to season five spent five years knowing us and believing in us, and, I don't know, you become akin with them... I'm not saying don't binge-watch Chuck or Heroes or whatever you can get, but it's a strange thing in that regard."
A new movie "every couple years or whatever" would be the perfect way to indoctrinate those new viewers into the fandom, no?
As for Levi's Heroes Reborn character, you're not going to find even an ounce of Chuck in his villainous Luke Collins. In fact, Levi asked for exactly the opposite of the goofy, good-natured electronics store employee/super spy when discussing the role with Heroes creator Tim Kring.
"My only prerequisite was I don't want to be Chuck," he said. "I want to be somebody that's kind of the antithesis of Chuck, if I can. I want to stretch myself and challenge myself and challenge audience perceptions of who I am and what I do. But who knows? At the end of this people could be like, yeah, stick to Chuck."
And while we're totally excited to see him on Heroes Reborn and wish Levi a long career filled with varied and fulfilling roles, part of us also hopes that "stick to Chuck" is exactly what he does.
Heroes Reborn premieres Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. on NBC.
(E! and NBC are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)