Kaffis Mark V wrote:
As it was, I expected them to milk the show for more ways to maintain the status quo and be completely predictable.
Actually, I see rather the opposite.
I was worried that the heavy amounts of character development and change they made for season 4 would ruin the formula that made chuck work. It did not. Chuck and Sarah are a happy couple - happy couples are the deathknell of drama shows - and yet it still works. (They're getting married in the season 4 finale.) Morgan Grimes is successful, brave, and competent. Chuck is a successful and independant member of the intelligence community that no longer gets into trouble due to his inexperience. Elly has come to terms with Chuck being a spy and is even getting involved in the Intersect project herself. I, too, figured they would maintain the status quo and it would get stale, but they didn't. They let the characters progress naturally and let them grow. My worries that the show would lose what made it fun if they did that proved unfounded, they keep finding new ways to keep it working.
It could be after Chuck and Sarah's wedding at the end of this season that it will run out of gas, in which case it's nice they're winding it up. But so far, despite all the changes, it has not.