NBC's Chuck is very Mac-heavy

I'm not sure what happened to the memo from top NBC brass, after the iTunes negotiations broke down, saying that Apple was firma non grata... but it clearly didn't make it to the Warner Bros. production offices of Chuck in time to excise all the Mac gear from the geek-themed spy comedy's pilot episode. The corporate rage may have found some outlet, however, in the sheer destructive energy expended on the show's poor, defenseless Macs. Even the presence of a nasty Windows virus (the kind that causes laptops to emit smoke and sparks!) as a plot point doesn't make up for the carnage.

There's the protagonist's doomed home machine, a G5 tower with a convenient sticker over the side logo -- which a) must be a lot lighter than a production model, seeing how it got tossed about; and b) suffers a grim fate as a gravity-test victim/close-combat weapon -- and earlier, there's another Mac that makes a key appearance in the opening sequence before getting blown to smithereens. (OK, seriously now, the CIA and NSA keep all their classified information -- all of it -- on one lonely Mac Plus? I sincerely doubt it.)

You can review the carnage at NBC's full-episode playback page; the Mac Plus detonation is in the first four minutes, and the G5 breakdown is at about 16 minutes in. Too bad you can't watch it on your iPhone, unless of course you EyeTV'ed it last night. Also spotted during this week's premieres: Emmy-nominee Doogie Neil Patrick Harris sporting an iPhone on How I Met Your Mother, an iPhone in the time-traveling toolkit of Journeyman star Kevin McKidd (more on this later), and another iPhone gag on the Simpsons season premiere. It's looking like a good year for Apple on TV; send us your spotter reports in the comments, or add your sightings to our "appleontv" Flickr pool.