Season finales have all aired and the campaigns to save NBC’s Chuck and Fox’s Dollhouse were short lived as I’ve heard both will survive to see at least one more September. But what I want to point out before the news becomes stale is the underlying problem with how the networks currently judge a program’s worth.

Right now, the primary concern of television network executives are ratings via a standard broadcast during prime time hours. Those “ratings” primarily come from places like Nielsen, which means they select a group of individuals across the nation that will represent a good sample of the population and give them a box that records their viewing habits. That’s how they get their demographics by age and gender, two of the most useful pieces of information used to reel in advertisers.

I don’t know about most of you, but I’m 25 years old and I’ve never once met anyone who had one of these Nielsen boxes. The closest I’ve come to even understanding how the whole process even works is due to an episode of Roseanne where the family got a Nielsen box and proceeded keep it tuned to PBS to mess with the statistics. Most of the episode was then filmed in the garage where they had a small older television with an antenna hooked up.

Chuck: The Complete First Season
Blu-ray edition
Starring Zachary Levi, Adam Baldwin, Yvonne Strahovski
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Release Date: November 11, 2008

Chuck is the classic Boy meets Girl, Boy falls for Girl, Girl turns out to be a secret agent who is coveting the super government computer stuck in Boy’s head type of story. Interested yet?

Co-created by Josh Schwartz, a former executive producer of the show The OC, the story follows the life of one Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), a computer technician for the large electronic retailer Buy More. On Chuck’s birthday, he receives an e-mail from an old college friend, Bryce, that uploaded million seemingly random pictures into his brain. Turns out Bryce is a government agent on the run and the pictures in question are actually encoded with highly classified government secrets. Along with a drop dead gorgeous CIA agent (Yvonne Strahovski) and a NSA killing machine (Adam Baldwin) by his side, Chuck is thrusted into the life of a secret agent,whether he likes it or not.