Zachary Levi outlines Chuck’s third season

NBC’s Chuck was originally set for a 13 episode third season, however NBC pre-emptively cancelled it’s cop show Southland and moved the Chuck premiere forward from March to January, at the same time adding six new episodes to the original 13 ordered. However it was not known how these new episodes would effect those already in production…

At a recent press interview for Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel, Chuck star Zachary Levi offered the solution to that dilemma, revealing that the back six episodes of the third season of the fan-favourite will comprise of a seperate arc than the first thirteen and tell a completely new storyline:

We were only going to do 13, so the writers wrote an arc for [episodes] 1-13. They were basically done writing them, and then the network said, ‘Hey, we’d like to do six more,’ and they’re like, ‘Well, great. We can’t rework the first arc, so we’ll just make these six stand alone.’ They’ll be based on the 13 that we do in the first part of the season, but it will be its own little mini-arc.

According to the story on SciFi Wire, the six-episode mini-arc is a relief to Levi. He was worried that if they had to spread the 13-episode story over 19 episodes, the extra six eps would feel like filler:

To be perfectly honest, I like 13 episodes, I like how cable does it. Thirteen episodes allows you to really make it lean and mean. You focus on those 13 episodes, and you make them all great, as opposed to the traditional 22-episode network season, which, if we’re all being honest, there tends to be a couple episodes that are like the packing peanuts. They’re the filler. ‘We didn’t really know what we were going to do this week, so everybody just vamp for a little while, and then we’ll come back for an episode that really means something.

Chuck returns to NBC for a special two-hour premiere Sunday, January 10th, followed by the 3rd episode on Monday at 8pm.