OTHER TECH

On the NBC action-comedy series Chuck, geeky electronics store employee Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) unwittingly becomes the U.S government's most valuable secret agent - helping save the world from the threat-of-the-week. This feat is particularly hard to pull off, since Chuck still has to work his day job at the Buy More, the show's intentionally obvious impersonation of Best Buy (the Buy More logo even employs the Best Buy blue-and-yellow color scheme).

So just how accurate is the show's depiction of the CIA, espionage, murder, and the consequences of having the nation's most precious security secrets downloaded into your brain?

Who cares? We just wanted to know how closely Chuck's Buy More reflects its real-life inspiration: Do Best Buy workers really watch movies in the stores' theater rooms? Do Geek Squad members (called the Nerd Herd on the show) really go joy-riding in the Geek-mobile? Is there really a special evacuation code word for use on Black Fridays?

To find out, we recruited two actual Best Buy employees to rate six key Buy More scenes from last season in terms of accuracy, based on their personal experiences. (To protect their secret identities, we'll refer to them as Best Buy Guy and Best Buy Girl - Hey, Chuck's not the only one forced to go underground!)

The show's second season kicks off with a special online-only premiere on Monday, Sept. 22, while that episode makes its TV debut a week later on Monday, Sept. 29. But more importantly, Chuck: The Complete First Season just hit DVD and Blu-ray shelves. Which means, you can pick one up at a Best Buy (how meta!). So just make sure you study the goings-on there on your way to the register.

Here's our hard, critical look at the Buy More.

Episode 1: "Pilot"

Chuck treats the Nerd Herd car as his very own pimpmobile - driving it home, parking it outside expensive clubs . . . and letting super-agent Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) destroy it in the course of a high-speed L.A. chase. Strangely, Chuck catches no flak from his boss for any of this. Best Buy Guy: All Best Buy Geek Squad members are given a Geek Squad car when they become agents. They use it as their own personal vehicles all the time, until they either quit the position or are fired - which happens more often than not at my location; car accidents are very common. One night we were closing up, and one of the agents, who came into the store to check his client list for the next day, starts telling me about his evening. Apparently, he'd been on a date that night, and once he'd dropped his date off, he was driving home in the Geek Squad car when a cop pulled him over. He noticed that the cop is actually a girl, and in fact a really gorgeous woman. She informed him that he was over the speed limit. He spent like 30 minutes flirting his way out of a ticket, and actually ended up taking the cop for a ride in his Geek Squad car when she got off duty.

Episode 2: "Chuck Versus the Helicopter"

Chuck and Sarah go on a date to the Buy More after closing - if you could call a "date" having a creepy doctor flash images on a screen in an effort to probe secrets from your brain. The spy shenanigans take place in the store's home theater room - the first of many times the show's characters use said room's monster screen for "personal viewing."

Best Buy Girl: Generally when you walk by the home theater department in any Best Buy, you'll see the TVs playing the same repetitive loops of videos that encourage customers to buy a high-quality television. One night when the store was closed, I walked by the home theater department and realized that the usual videos weren't playing - instead I could hear grunts and "Ooh Ooh" sounds. I went over to investigate and found four or five of the home theatre guys sitting on the couches watching porn. I guess my manager also heard the noise and she came over to investigate. She was super-shocked and embarrassed and definitely wrote all those guys up.