by Cory Barker
Final paper for a graduate seminar on the Spy genre.
When the low-rated series was in jeopardy of being cancelled during its second season in the spring of 2009, fans (and... more
When the low-rated series was in jeopardy of being cancelled during its second season in the spring of 2009, fans (and to a lesser extent, critics) took to the internet and its most popular applications in hopes of “saving” it. Chuck fans’ attempts to save their favorite series was particularly in-depth and expansive, crossing over from general awareness about how and when to watch the final new episodes, voting in random “Save our show!” polls and sending letters to NBC executives to an impressive “real world” operation that involved donating money to the American Heart Association in the series’ name and buying and eating as many sandwiches from a primary series’ sponsor Subway. By the end of April 2009, just weeks before NBC was to decide on Chuck’s fate, the Subway campaign had been so effective that the series’ star Zachary Levi was joining in, taking over hundreds of fans to a Subway in the United Kingdom. When NBC made the somewhat shocking decision to renew Chuck a few weeks later, executive Ben Silverman specifically acknowledged that the fans played an extremely important role in helping the series survive, noting “Both the fans of the shows that matter and the advertisers of the shows raised their hands to say, ‘We need ‘Chuck on the schedule.’ We will send you Nerds. We will buy Subway $5 footlongs. We will do whatever it takes.”
In many respects, Chuck fans serve as one of the most impressive representations of what empowered fans of a cult text can do in the 21st century with the assistance of the internet and social media. However, in the time after the whirlwind global movement and subsequent renewal, specific incidents have arisen that suggest the empowerment Chuck fans felt in the spring of 2009 has transitioned into something more like entitlement. After doing all of that hard work to save their favorite series, it appears as though some Chuck fans feel a certain larger sense of investment or ownership it the series and its characters. When a plot does not turn out the way they expected it to, as it did with a specific episode early in season three, the fans have rebelled in outrage, threatened to boycott, etc.
Therefore, Chuck fans fill a particularly complicated representation of 21st century cult fandom, serving as what I will be calling the “empowered/entitled.” This a group that has literally had one of the largest and most successful fan impacts on the trajectory of its favorite text, but it is my belief that because of that impact, the fans are now in an uncharted, awkward territory where their believed ownership of Chuck has affected in the series in multiple, potentially problematic ways. This essay will explore how this empowered/entitled dynamic has been created and continues to exist within Chuck fandom and will also suggest how and why this specific series and this specific fandom serves as a perfect test case for what is probably to come in the future for the fan-producer relationship.
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![](http://photos.academia.edu/834585/292626/346178/tiny_giulia.ferrato.jpg?1325143644 "<strong>Giulia Ferrato</strong><br/>University of Naples "L'Orientale""){kind=small}
