EXCLUSIVE! When will Chuck return?

There's a slim possibility we may not have to wait until next Autumn for a new season of Chuck, reckons its star Zachary Levi. One of the hits of the '07 US TV Fall season, Chuck (which SFX loves and begins airing in the UK in April on Virgin 1), was given an order for a full season pretty soon after it began airing. But then the writers' strike got in the way, and production shut down after 13 episodes.

SFX spoke to Levi earlier this week, and he reassured us that in one way or another the show will be back:

"“It will definitely come back, yeah," said Levi. "For no other reason than the fact that Warner Brothers has put so much money into it I can’t imagine that they would be like, ‘Ah, alright, we’re just gonna scrap it.’ But that aside, the numbers have been good, the audience continues to grow and the media and the press have really gotten behind it. I don’t know if we’ve had a bad review. We’ve had some that have been, like, not ‘It’s the greatest thing we’ve ever seen,’ but continually they’ve been, ‘This is one of my favourite shows from this season.' And I don’t know if you could take all of those things combined and not [bring the show back]. And considering that they picked us up for a back nine – and that was after the strike had already been announced – they knew what they were doing. They calculated the risk and they knew it was going to happen, and they knew that the strike could go for quite some time. It was just a matter of, 'Are we going to finish the rest of the first season, or will the strike take so long we’ll just have to wait and pick up for the second season?”

And is that what’s going to happen now, SFX asked him?

“Possibly. I dunno. There’s an outside chance [it'll return earlier]… The Directors' Guild is getting their negotiations pretty much settled. So if that happens then I think the WGA pretty much has to follow suit. And if it has anything to do with me I’ll make sure the actors don’t strike. There’s no reason to. We don’t deserve anything better than the directors and the writers.”