NBC is going green all week long! What does this mean? The peacock logo that perches (rather annoyingly) in the corner of the screen during shows is green. Sometimes, a lil’ green feather detaches and sets up a green tip. Did you know you should buy a power strip to plug all your stuff into, and then turn the strip off, because when electric devices are plugged into the wall, they still use up electricity? I’m unplugging my refrigerator right now!

But back to the question at hand: How is NBC turning its prime-time programs green? We watched Chuck and Heroes to find out.

Chuck: Computer nerd turned fledgling spy Chuck goes back to Stanford, which kicked him out for allegedly cheating (he says he was innocent). Guess what, there’s a Green Festival on campus the day of a big football game. There’s a big sign for the Nature Conservancy. Nice brand placement! A student tells Casey the spy to plant a tree. Casey tells the student to take a shower. Casey, Casey, Casey! You should have told him to take a very short shower, since heating water uses up earth’s resources! Also, planting trees is good. Casey is clearly not green.

Since this show is all about subliminal messages, we looked for subliminal green messages. An evil manager at Buy More, Harry Tang, drinks coffee from a mug. Way to go, Harry–no Styrofoam for you.  Maybe you're not so evil after all. A nameless Icelandic spy likes to ding victims with a crossbow. Way to go, Icelandic spy. Crossbows definitely seem more eco-friendly than guns and bullets and bombs and stuff. Best of all: The episode solved a mystery. Howcum Chuck’s roomie falsely accused him of cheating? Because Chuck’s roomie didn’t want the CIA to recruit Chuck, because he has too much heart to be a spy. So instead, the roomie ruined Chuck’s life. Plus, now Chuck is a spy anyway. This revelation means that many curious viewers can unplug their TV sets from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. every Monday, thus saving electricity. Um, unless you are tempted to tune in next week to see if Chuck and Sarah, his CIA handler, engage in a little tree hugging, if you get my drift.

Heroes: The only hints of greenness on Monday's episode were that darn green peacock logo, a green glow around the planet in the intro sequence, and a video during a commercial break in which cast members planted trees in large pots at what appeared to be Rockefeller Center. ("My character wants to destroy the world and I want to save it," one actor says, although I might recommend taking this beyond potted plants.)

This leaves us with the fundamental sustainability questions of Heroes: Do superpowers like regeneration and mind-reading emit carbon dioxide? Can dramatic music be recycled? Do cheerleaders pollute? One of the characters has been in 17th-century Japan since the end of last season, so you can't accuse him of overusing fossil fuels, since he's hanging out with samurai in a pre-industrial society. However, his power is teleportation, which sounds like it would use a lot of energy. Where does he get this energy? Perhaps NBC could explore these questions the next time they have a green week.

Meanwhile, the best green plot line of the week clearly belongs to The Biggest Loser. Here it is: “the contestants learn to exercise without electricity.” We’d like to recycle an excellent joke at this point, from the current issue of Entertainment Weekly: “Wow, neato! Foot-powered bicycles, self-propelled aquatic travel, treadmills called ‘sidewalks’!”

And you know we’ll be watching when Nobel prize guy Al Gore utters these immortal words on Thursday’s  30 Rock: “A whale is in trouble. I have to go!”

Pop Omnivore readers, our trivia question for you: Has a Nobel laureate ever appeared on a sitcom (or comedy program) before? We’ll have the answer on Friday! Hint: It's absolutely, positively not Albert Schweitzer in a Very Special Episode of I Love Lucy.

-Marc Silver and Helen Fields

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