I was a little apprehensive about watching the second season of Chuck.  While I enjoyed the first set of shows, the program seemed to be a one-trick pony:  geek-turned-spy gets in trouble and rescued by his handlers, one of which is a hot babe.  It could easily fall into a parody of itself, and I was pretty much expecting that to happen.  Luckily I was wrong.  The second season expands the show greatly.  They examine the backgrounds of several main and supporting characters, come up with interesting multi-episode story lines, and have the characters grow over the course of the season.  Not only that, but the show still has a great mix of action and comedy.
 
Series Background:
 
Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) was a brilliant student at Stanford until his life came crashing down on him.  It all happened when his roommate and best friend, Bryce, stole his first (and only) girlfriend, Jill, and then conspired to get him kicked out of college.  That was five years ago and Chuck finds himself living with his sister, Ellie (Sarah Lancaster), a doctor, and her boyfriend, a mountain-climbing sky-diving doctor who Chuck refers to as Captain Awesome (Ryan McPartlin.)  He works at the local Buy More, and when he's not working hangs out with his uber-nerd friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez).

Things all change one evening when, out of the blue, Chuck receives an e-mail from Bryce.  It turns out to be a massive series of images that hold Chuck transfixed for hours.  When the images stop cycling, he passes out.
 
It turns out that Bryce was a spy for the CIA who went rouge.  For some reason he broke into the computer that contained all the information that both the CIA and NSA had collected over the years in encrypted form, the Intersect, and downloaded it, destroyed the computer, and then tried to escape.  He didn't quite make it and with his dying breath e-mailed the information to Chuck.  Chuck now has the sum total information that the US government has collected since 9/11 stored in his brain, and when his computer accidentally gets destroyed when the CIA tries to steal it, he is the ONLY source of that information. 
 
The problem is that he can't access the data at will.  There has to be a visual trigger that will cause him to remember something.  Since such important information can't be allowed to walk the streets freely, he gets two agents assigned to watch his every move:  cute and sexy CIA agent Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) who poses as Chuck's girlfriend, and psychopathic killer NSA agent John Casey (Adam Baldwin) who gets a job at the Buy More and moves into the apartment across from Chuck's.
 
The Season:
 
As the season opens it looks like Chuck's spying nightmare is almost over.  The intelligence community has just about finished making the second Intersect.  Unfortunately Fulcrum, the evil organization that has infiltrated the CIA, manages to steal the main chip, which means Sarah, Casey, and Chuck have to retrieve it.  Easier said than done.  What makes matters even worse is that Casey has orders to kill Chuck once the second Intersect is up and running.  After all the CIA and NSA can't let someone with all that information run around unprotected and they can't protect a redundant resource forever.
 
Naturally things go wrong and Chuck does not get killed in the second episode, but that is a threat that hangs over his head for the season.  What's more, his private life gets thrown into upheaval when his old girlfriend Jill turns up and happens to be working for a man the CIA thinks is selling secrets.  When her boss gets thrown out of a high rise window, Chuck has to get close to Jill to discover how much she knows. 
 
Chuck's life isn't the only one in upheaval either.  Viewers find out about Sarah's past when she has to follow a suspect to her own high school reunion, and her father pops up too, something that she doesn't necessarily welcome.  John Casey has trouble too when he finds out that his sensei has gone rogue and has started recruiting his old students.
 
This was a great season, mainly because they developed the characters and told longer, more involved stories.  There was more continuity this time around, not so much that it was easy to get confused, but just enough so you'll want to start the next episode as soon as one finishes. 
 
The show really succeeds because of the actors who play the main characters.  Zachary Levi is wonderful in the title role, playing him as an ordinary guy in extraordinary situations that everyone can relate to.  He has just the right amount of panic and grasping at straws that makes him seem real.  He's a bit more used to being on the wrong end of a gun in this season however and manages to actually help on some cases by using his brains rather than just reacting instinctively.