Best Internet Variety Show (and Good Luck Getting Anything Done, Ever) in 2005! 
What makes Chuck fans different from most is that rather than just expressing the depth of their love, they tried to think pragmatically as well as passionately about keeping their show on the air.
It's a common internet truism that if you're not paying for ad-supported media, you're not the customer — you, as an eyeball to be advertised to, are the product. It's most commonly said about services like Facebook, but it's just as true of ad-supported television. And Chuck fans, in their businesslike enthusiasm, sold themselves as a product.
"Specifically, rather than trying to prove how much they loved the show (which is what it demonstrates when you send a network nuts or Mars bars), they took their argument to a sponsor, Subway, when the third season was imperiled. Attacking sponsors who support shows to which you object is old news; enthusiastically presenting yourself as a potentially loyal customer was an approach that had never been deployed in a way that got so much attention. Even star Zachary Levi participated, marching a small army of fans to a Subway to participate in the campaign to buy a footlong sandwich on the night of the season finale, which fans called "Finale And A Footlong." In a five-part interview with Alan Sepinwall of Hitfix, Josh Schwartz, who co-created the show with Chris Fedak, calls it "the sandwich revolution."
Subway has remained a major sponsor of Chuck, and has been the beneficiary of winkingly obvious product placements that fans have basically promised to cheerfully tolerate. "They brought in Subway flatbread breakfast sandwiches!" says a character in this clip. "With Chipotle Southwest sauce!" When the show's most adoring, social-media-savvy fans see those Subway placements, they don't associate them merely with crude commercialism, but with a successful negotiation. The sponsor, who is normally seen as an intrusive, obnoxious presence in a television show, has managed to become part of the team that brings the show to the people who love it.
It's entirely overstating the case to claim that the fans who happily offered themselves up to Subway — or that the extensive social media campaigns that accompanied the Subway push — saved the show. Network decision-making is far more complicated than that. But what's important about the Subway campaign is that the fans saw themselves differently, not as people who had to beg for kindness from the network, but as people whose most important job was to prove their value to the sponsor. In the crude "you are the product" calculus, it's the difference between offering value to the people you are asking to sell you (the network) and offering it to the people you are asking to buy you (the sponsor)."
