“Beauty and the Geek” — Season Premiere
As far as reality-dating competitions are concerned, you can’t do much better than Beauty and the Geek. The Bachelor is far too cheesy to stomach and the I Love the Flavor of the Rock’s Charm School franchise on VH1 elicits too much of a gag reflex to tune in regularly. Beauty and the Geek, amazingly, works. Maybe it’s the fact that the cast is closer to my age, but it’s probably more that I find myself able to relate to the geeks at sometimes shocking levels of familiarity. Look, I’m no LARPing, sci-fi obsessed, computer programmer with bad fashion sense and few social skills (well, maybe bad fashion sense), but then again I do watch hours upon hour of television every day and blog about it. These are my people. Plus, I’m a sucker for the time-tested rom-com pairing of “kids from different sides of the tracks” learning a thing or two about how the other lives. More after the jump…
Beauty and the Geek also knows the power in showing awkwardness between the sexes — at least in terms of targeting an audience that is watching TV on a Tuesday night. The series obviously is going for the most extreme cases, but when I watch I’m reminded of how boys and girls would interact in third grade. It’s so weird to watch something on television where the big romantic climax could be as tame as “liking” someone. Sure, the sexual tension is amped up to ridiculous levels, but when everyone gets comfortable what you have is a really sweet, very simple, coming of age tale (while competing for cash and prizes).
It doesn’t hurt that the show is funny. Really funny. Over the course of last night’s two-hour premiere (which I fast-forwarded a bit through) I laughed out loud several times. Like when one of the girls said, “I think Tony’s gonna be a diamond in the rust.” I love that comment. I love it because it’s wrong, but also because it could be right. I mean, finding a diamond in rust would be a pretty cool and unexpected thing — probably a lot like Tony! While a lot of the humor is at the expense of the guys awkwardness or the girls unworldliness, it rarely comes off as mean spirited. In a way, it’s almost charming and makes you like the characters more.
The big twist this season (a twist that wasn’t kept under wraps that well despite being revealed with seconds left in the episode) is that a team was added to the competition comprised of a nerdy girl and a studly guy. Nerdy girls are awesome. That’s something on which all of us geeks can agree. Will this seriously shake up the action? Probably not. What if they get voted off the first week? Still, it’s nice to mix things up — and is really a move the show should have incorporated from day one.
This isn’t a show I plan on watching every week, especially given the fact that I’m already swamped with new television begging for consumption, but Beauty and the Geek is fantastic passive entertainment. It’s the type of series you’re thrilled to find rerunning in a marathon on a rainy Saturday.
