Still, in spy stories generally, collecting data is a means to an end: it’s Sydney Bristow going incognito to discover the location of another Rimbaldi artifact in Alias, or Chloe typing furiously into a computer to ID a terrorist for 24′s Jack Bauer as he tries to find a nuclear device. But more recently we’ve seen spy stories in which data itself is the weapon, the source of ultimate power.

This idea was the premise, half-serious and half-comic, behind the spy comedy-drama Chuck, whose title character—a clerk at a big-box electronic store—became a master of espionage after downloading the contents of a massive intel database (the Intersect). The execution may have been funny, but the idea is less so now: the notion was that espionage was evolving, so that power lay not simply in the collection of massive amounts of data, but the computer-assisted ability to analyze, break down, and see patterns in it. That Chuck worked selling computer systems was no accident; the show was the merger of the themes of post-9/11 security and the idea that the geeks truly do rule the Earth.

That was also the premise, carried out much more soberly and less optimistically, in the great, short-lived AMC thriller Rubicon. That was another intel drama, but its heroes and antiheroes were not karate-chopping spies but overworked analysts crunching surveillance data for a government-contracting firm. The issue in this spy drama was not collecting spy data, but that the national-security apparatus had amassed so much of it that the trick was finding the resources and brainpower to make sense of it—a job that in this show was uncertain and rife with the possibility of mistakes, abuse, and conspiracy.