The Onion AV Club's Tolerability Index, observing the forthcoming Moonlight and midseason replacement New Amsterdam, recently noted with bemusement that "'vampire policeman looking for love' is now, for some reason, a TV genre." (This observation was graded slightly worse than "mildly irritating.")

The new genre I'd grade further to the right than that, though, is "underachieving big box store employee with loser friend gets abilities and a hot love interest." We now have two of these on the schedule, Reaper and Chuck, clearly demonstrating that at the moment Hollywood is too busy cannibalizing Judd Apatow to move on to fresh pastures.

The main thing that's wrong with this concept, as I mentioned in my review of the Chuck series premiere, is that it's set in some Marty Sam fantasy universe where the protagonist gets handed a life change on a platter and all he has to do is go, "Whoa. Awesome." The love interest, of course, is always gorgeous (is there a man shortage in this fantasy world? Or, perhaps more likely, an overabundance of hot chicks?), and, like all fantasies coursing through the minds of boys who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s, the package comes with some form of cool Jedi magic.

But the sidekicks are what's really peculiar. Hollywood seems to have developed an entirely new phenomenon I'll call "platonic homoeroticism." The sidekicks in both shows – Sock (Tyler Labine) in Reaper and Morgan (Joshua Gomez, channeling Jason Schwartzman) in Chuck -- revolve their worlds around the hero, are constantly hanging onto him and even leaping into his arms, and making ambiguous comments, and yet it's crystal clear frem the dynamic that their male bonding is entirely heterosexual. Someone trying to write slash fiction about either of these pairs would be completely stymied, because the connection is entirely unsexual.

The thing is, straight buddies are normally equals on TV; this fawning, joined-at-the-hip straight sidekick thing is new and strange. And it's going to get old fast.