Growing up good — provided you know more government secrets than James Bond or the Devil hands you occult powers. That’s the message of two new shows, NBC’s “Chuck” and the CW’s “Reaper,” which kick off Monday and Tuesday, respectively, next week.

Of the two, “Chuck,” which is produced by Josh Schwartz, the ubiquitous presence behind “The O.C.” and now “Gossip Girl,” is the more ambitious — though “Reaper,” for which Kevin Smith, of “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy” fame, wrote and directed the opening episode, is no slouch either, and is overall more goofy and relaxed. It’s hard not to like a show in which escapees from Hell are sent back there via a portal at the local DMV — “Hell on Earth.” If you’re the one delivering the ashes, you don’t even have to stand in line, you just have to look for the teller who briefly sprouts tiny horns from her forehead: She’ll take care of you right away.

“Reaper” begins on the day Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) turns 21. It’s been a remarkably easy life for him thus far, and his parents have never pushed him for a moment. When he reported that college made him feel “sleepy,” they allowed him to drop out after a month without protest. Nor do they seem to mind that he’s content with a low-paying job at Work Bench, a Home Depot-style behemoth, and that his best buddy and co-worker is nicknamed “Sock” (Tyler Labine), a dude who looks like he’s just emerged from an unsuccessful spell of electro-shock therapy. It’s all about the complete lack of pressure: If Sam wants to do sweet-all with his life under the soft drizzle of Seattle, that’s fine.

Which is why the air of anxiety in the Oliver household on the morning of his birthday feels so strange. Why are Mom and Dad so uptight? Why is everything on his way to work so weird? What are all these snapping dogs that surround his car? Why does the day feel so full of strange portents? And once at work, how exactly does he manage to save the life of cute co-worker Andi (Nikki Reed), whom he has a crush on, when an air-conditioner is about to fall on her head? It seems like he flew through the air and diverted the AC unit from its lethal path without actually touching it, though everyone thinks he did.

Well, as Dad explains later, it turns out that before he and Sam’s mother had children, he — Dad — became very ill and saved his own life by promising to sell the soul of his first-born to the Devil. (The obvious question, “Dad, how did you, uh, meet the devil,” goes unasked.) Now the time for debt collection is due. The Devil (Ray Wise) — suave, mannerly, and beautifully turned out, of course — wants Sam to act as his personal bounty hunter, chasing down those who have escaped back to Earth from the Inferno. He has some gadgets to help Sam with the job, and a pretty strict schedule for him to keep. When Sam fails on his first assignment and pleads with Satan to be excused, the following bit of dialog occurs.

“You do this a lot, don’t you?”

“Do what?”

“Give up. Things get hard, little Sammy takes the path of least resistance …”

There’s no point in arguing with the Prince of Darkness. Grow up, kid. You’ve got a real job — and, as it turns out, a pretty cool one, too. When Sam explains to Sock what’s been going on — “My parents sold my soul to the Devil” — Sock is deeply impressed. “You lucky bastard,” he says. “Nothing cool like that every happens to me, man.”

In comparison with the slightly grungy “Reaper,” “Chuck” is all glittery and high-tech. Chuck (Zachary Levi) works in IT at one of those vast electronics emporia that you regret stepping into and seem never to be able to get out of. As head of the store’s “Nerd Herd” squad, his uniform is appropriately geeky and he has the requisite ballpoint pens sticking out of his shirt pocket.

Chuck lives with his handsome, sensible sister, Ellie (Sarah Lancaster), and her hunky boyfriend (Ryan McPartlin) — they’re both training to be doctors — in the trendy Silverlake district of Los Angeles. He’s in his mid-20s, his best friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez) is a fellow-slacker, and his last girlfriend, Jill, was stolen from him years ago by his college roommate, Bryce (Matthew Bomer), who’s now an accountant living in Washington, D.C.

In fact, Bryce is not an accountant. He’s a rogue CIA agent, and shortly before being assassinated following an elaborate rooftop chase in the nation’s capital — one of several terrific set pieces in the pilot — he sends Chuck an e-mail with an unusually large attachment. Said attachment, when opened, transmits a truckload of ultra-classified government secrets, in the form of an imagestring, into the recipient’s brain. In this case, Chuck’s.

Once the security breach is discovered, a Ninja-style CIA agent, Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strzechowski), who dresses her marvel of a body in sexy black underwear and equally sexy overwear, comes after Chuck’s computer, but rather improbably destroys it in the process of showing off her full array of comically absurd martial arts moves. Chuck is now in effect a walking database of classified information. The question is whether to kill him or nurture him. An NSA officer, John Casey (Adam Baldwin) is inclined to the former, but Sarah thinks it better to befriend him.

Assuming there must be a backup drive to his computer, she lures him out on a date (not very difficult). This starts with dinner (relatively peaceful), followed by a trip to a nightclub in which Sarah manages (a) to drag Chuck out onto the dance floor, alien territory for him, and (b) impale about five different secret agents who are trying to kill him with a variety of hairpins and daggers while Chuck assumes she is merely dancing with an unusually exotic flair. Then follows a hilarious car chase in the “Nerd Herd” company vehicle (Sarah driving, of course — backward), which ends with the duo evading their pursuers by careening down several flights of a lengthy outdoor staircase. (“Computer emergency!” an onlooker observes wryly.)

Like “Reaper,” “Chuck” is fun and silly, a pleasant way to while away an hour, a complete waste of time. It depends on your mood. Whether it’s “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” or “Chuck” or Sam in “Reaper,” nerds and geeks and slackers growing up fast is a big theme nowadays. We live in perilous times, don’t you know, and if it takes a rogue CIA agent downloading an acid-trip’s worth of classified information into Chuck’s brainpan to deliver this truth, so be it. Like Sam, Chuck is now an adolescent fantasy of a grown-up. He’s also a valuable government asset, and it seems he may have, in Sarah, the prospect of an unusually good-looking girlfriend who knows how to kill people. It’s a start.

bbernhard@nysun.com