When it comes to saving the TV series Chuck from cancellation, fans are putting their money—and submarine sandwiches—where their mouths are.
While NBC said it will make a decision on the future of Chuck by May 5, fans and TV critics have united with a spirited online campaign to save the series from extinction.
Chuck, which airs on Citytv in Canada, was one of the trendiest topics on Twitter on Monday night. It ranked only behind information on the swine flu outbreak, while an online petition to keep the show on the air counted more than 7,600 signatures by Tuesday afternoon.
Fans urged each other to pack Subway restaurants Monday as part of a campaign to save the show by boosting one of its primary advertisers. Their strategy was to buy a footlong Subway sandwich then fill out a comment card crediting Chuck with the purchase.
Why? Because Chuck has featured some cheeky product placements for Subway.
The show’s star, Zachary Levi, gave the campaign a boost when he led hundreds of fans to a Subway in Birmingham, England over the weekend, before stepping behind the counter to personally assemble the sandwiches.
“You see, NBC? This is what happens when you might cancel a show that people care about,” he said in the clip, which has been uploaded to YouTube.
Subway is enjoying all of the attention, particularly since the movement began without the restaurant chain’s interference.
“Obviously, as a marketer, if you started that kind of behaviour, you’d be called out pretty quickly,” Tony Pace, chief marketing officer for the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust, told Advertising Age this week.
“But if the behaviour is already out there, you can encourage it without being too heavy-handed. And that’s what we’ve tried to do.”
But will buying lots of subs actually buy Chuck another season?
TV Week has reported that Subway was thrilled with the initial impact on sandwich sales after the Chuck product placement and that they let NBC know about it.
Newark Star-Ledger TV critic Alan Sepinwall said going directly to the network’s advertisers was a savvy move by Chuck fans.
“If Subway’s happy with it, and they go to NBC, NBC might look at it and say, ‘Well here’s a show where we can try to create other relationships with the advertisers,’ and then suddenly the ratings are less important than the deals they can cut,” he said.
