Why a Sixth Season as Books?

Experiencing Chuck as a book series instead of a TV series.

Not long after finishing the Chuck TV series for the second time I started to get ideas for additional episodes. My brain couldn’t rest with the series ending the way it did. The way I experienced those ideas were as stories and those stories naturally evolved as prose. A question I get frequently though is why not write those stories as scripts also known as screenplays. I seriously considered it but found the format didn’t allow me to express my ideas in a way that was satisfying.

I felt like I was only writing part of the story.

When screenplays are brought to life on screen, the actors contribute hugely to the final product; they literally breathe life into the characters, so much so that if you change actors, the entire product feels different. Likewise the set designers, the camera men, the director, the lighting crew and everyone else involved in the production all add significantly to the final product, and I find that for that reason the screenplay format is insufficient to tell a great story, it is a starting point not a finished product. To write a book, though, allows me to play all those roles and create a story that captures the highs and lows of falling in love with a person who is pretending to love you for the sake of a cover story. The more I think about it the more I realize the brilliance of Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak, the creators of Chuck.

When I started the process of creating a sixth season I wanted to follow the pattern of a TV series and decided on a 20 episode season. The number of episodes in a season of Chuck varied wildly, the first and fifth seasons each only had 13 episodes. The second season had 22, the third 19 and the fourth 24. So I picked 20, that will undoubtedly change, just how much I’m not yet sure. As I’ve worked on fleshing out the episodes I’ve realized that I have a few two part episodes that should probably be combined into one and I’ve had some additional ideas for stories that I may add into the season.

Another advantage to writing the series as books is that if I do get Warner Brothers on board with this project, I think having audio books would really bring them to life. I find I "read" and enjoy a lot more audio books than when I was reading and it would be a great way to experience the books.