My Favorite TV Shows

Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) is in his twenties, living in Burbank, California, working as a computer expert in the Nerd Herd at his local Buy More (parodies of Best Buy's Geek Squad),^[15] a large retail consumer-electronics chain, with his best friend, Morgan Grimes (Joshua Gomez). Chuck's sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster) and her now-husband Devon "Captain Awesome" Woodcomb (Ryan McPartlin) are doctors who are constantly encouraging Chuck to make progress in his professional and romantic life. At the beginning of the series, Chuck receives an e-mail from Bryce Larkin (Matthew Bomer), his former Stanford University roommate, who is now an apparently "rogue" CIA agent. When he opens it, the entire database of all the US government's secret information — a neural supercomputer called the Intersect — is subliminally embedded into his brain. Both the NSA and the CIA want the intelligence returned to them and dispatch agents of their own — Colonel John Casey (Adam Baldwin) and Agent Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) — to retrieve the data.

Since the information was stolen by Bryce and the government's copy is destroyed in his attempted escape, and since Chuck experiences "flashes" of information from the database activated by certain triggers around him (such as faces, voices, in-context keywords, and various objects), he must use the knowledge he now possesses to help the government thwart assassins and international terrorists — upending his previously uneventful life. In order to preserve their safety, Chuck must keep his newfound occupation a secret from his family and friends, forcing Casey and Walker to establish an uneasy alliance and secret identities; Walker poses as Chuck's girlfriend and takes a cover job at a local restaurant near the Buy More while Casey reluctantly goes undercover as part of the Buy More team.

As the series progresses, it is revealed that rogue spies are engaged in a secret war with the legitimate intelligence community, and that Bryce stole the Intersect to keep the real rogue spies from capturing it. The rogue spies believe they can aid their cause by capturing the human Intersect or by building their own Intersect.

In the finale of Season 3, Shaw is revealed to be alive and has downloaded the Intersect as well, and attempts to kill Sarah, Chuck and Casey, and compromise both the NSA and CIA. Chuck thwarts this plan, although his father is killed and his sister finally discovers his double life. The side-effects from the Intersect cause Chuck to regain a childhood memory in which he learns that he accidentally downloaded an early copy of the Intersect into his brain when he was still a young child. The season ends with a retired Chuck discovering his father's secret spy base, dedicated to locating and protecting Chuck's mother and performing spy work that "governments are afraid to do."

Season 4 begins with Chuck and Morgan out of jobs and traveling around the world looking for Chuck's mother, Mary Elizabeth Bartowski (Linda Hamilton), and soon rejoining the CIA, despite Ellie's initial discomfort with Chuck risking his life on spy work. Chuck and Sarah continue to have communication issues, and Chuck's search for his mother entangles him in a fight with Russian international arms dealer Alexei Volkoff (Timothy Dalton) and his far-reaching organization Volkoff Industries, who she was assigned to infiltrate 20 years earlier.