Chuck, the alternately endearing and preposterous tale of an underachieving nerd who gets all of the government's secrets planted in his head, wraps up on NBC on Friday, January 27. NBC will be glad to shed the show, now seen by only about 3.3 million households each week. Chuck's owner, Warner Bros. Television, faces an uncertain future as it tries to peddle the show's 91 episodes into the lucrative rerun market.

All this financial gloom for a romantic comedy/spy parody that experts say is still one of the most-talked-about shows on the Internet and a program that critics hail as one of the most intriguing TV concepts in years.

"Have you seen the ratings?" asked NBC president Robert Greenblatt during a press event earlier this month. "That rabid fan base that was going crazy on the net…didn't come to the show. The show is doing a 1 rating. Chuck is over. Let's alert the masses."

Blunt words from an executive about one of his own products—especially since he was the guy who unexpectedly approved Chuck's fifth season just a few months ago. He did it, he said then, because he hoped to rebuild NBC's Friday-night schedule and thought Chuck's small but noisy Internet following would help him bootstrap new programming.

But the hour-long scripted program didn't deliver on Fridays, just as it had failed for four seasons as NBC's Monday-night anchor. NBC is now so anxious to banish Chuck that it burned off new episodes during the Christmas holidays and is ganging the last two one-hour installments on finale night. As a ratings grabber, Chuck has historically proven so awful that NBC stopped showing summer reruns several years ago.

So why does Warner, which slashed the show's production budget and gave NBC huge discounts on licensing fees for the last three seasons, think Chuck has a future in syndication?

Another Warner show featuring nerds, The Big Bang Theory, which coincidentally premiered on CBS the same night as Chuck in September 2007, is already doing phenomenal syndication business. But Chuck's only sustained non-NBC exposure, a SyFy Channel marathon two years ago, wasn't particularly noteworthy. And, this season at least, Warner hasn't distributed Chuck via Hulu.com or sold episodes on iTunes or Amazon.com. Sales of the first four seasons on DVD and Blu-Ray have been modest.

"There's scuttlebutt that Warner already has a [syndication] deal," one TV analyst told me via email. "But I'm skeptical of the show's ability to perform. It [uses serialized storytelling], which makes it difficult for new viewers to jump in and understand what is going on. And let's face it, Chuck is not everyone's cup of TV tea."

That's where critical acclaim and social media kicks in. If not for the rapturous reviews and impassioned Internet fan base, Chuck surely would have been canceled and forgotten after the abysmal ratings of its 2008-2009 second season. Internet buzz and good reviews, not sound business judgment, have kept Chuck alive and spying for three additional years.

Chuck had a reasonable financial pedigree when it premiered in 2007. It was co-created by Josh Schwartz, the whiz kid behind The O.C. and Gossip Girl. The pilot was directed by McG, best known for the Charlie's Angels movies. The cast was a felicitous mix of rising stars (Zachary Levi), sci-fi genre icons (Adam Baldwin), and a gifted, if then-unknown, Australian actor named Yvonne Strahovski. And the show's story, if you bought into its peculiar premise, was a hoot.