Geek love

The nerds and Playboy pinups in CW's "Beauty and the Geek" give us a reality show we can really cuddle up with.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Geeks, TV, Season Finales, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Reality TV, Ashton Kutcher, CW

Photo: Warner Bros.

Scooter Zackheim and Megan Hauserman in "Beauty and the Geek."

Feb. 14, 2007 | My first kindergarten report card -- this was in the 1960s, when kindergarteners were not yet expected to compete for placement at Harvard -- consisted of just two columns, one headed "Excellent," the other "Needs Improvement." The neat row of check marks in the "Excellent" column proved that I had fully mastered shoe-tying, coloring and chalkboard erasing. In fact, I had earned an "Excellent" check mark in every category -- except for one. In the category "Works and Plays Well With Others," the teacher -- having taken note, I'm sure, of my extreme shyness, as well as perhaps a slight streak of brattiness -- had checked "Needs Improvement."

This blight on my otherwise-perfect record filled me with anguish and worry: Surely, I wasn't fit to live in the world of people. Whatever the problem was, I must have corrected it to the teacher's satisfaction, because I never got another "Needs Improvement" in that category again. But when I serendipitously started watching the CW reality show "Beauty and the Geek," last season, the significance of that one lonely check mark came floating back to me. This is the reality show for young men and women whose social skills are either nonexistent or so carefully waxed and polished that they reflect only their owners' shallowest qualities, blinding them to the surprising and sometimes wonderful messiness of real human beings. This is the show for people who need improvement in the "Works and Plays Well With Others" department -- which can apply to viewers as well as to contestants.

"Beauty and the Geek," whose third season will end with tonight's episode, isn't a dating show: Its aim isn't to foster romantic pairings, although sometimes that does end up happening. Executive-produced by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg -- both of whom are also behind "Punk'd," a show that celebrates the modern-day practical joke as a form of crude folk art -- "Beauty and the Geek" pairs off eight "beauties" (good-looking young women who prefer lying on a tanning bed to cracking a book) with eight "geeks" (guys who could bring a crashed hard drive back from the dead but who wouldn't know a tube of Neutrogena after-shave balm even if it beamed itself down from Romulus). At the beginning of the season, each beauty chooses her geek, sight unseen: The women are seated in a room with their backs to the guys, who enter one by one and attempt to make themselves as attractive as possible with their vast stores of knowledge and sometimes less-robust stockpiles of wit -- an awkward mating dance that reflects the propensity, found everywhere in the natural world, for the male of the species to show off in order to impress the female.

Once a woman has chosen her partner (the two are stuck with each other for the season, for better and sometimes for worse), the eight teams, all of whom are holed up in a luxe West Coast mansion, proceed to compete against one another in a series of potentially humiliating tasks designed to target their respective weak spots. In one episode, each team was given a loaner dog. The beauties were asked to build a doghouse from a small heap of materials and tools placed in front of them, while the geeks were sent out to a nearby park, their temporary pets in tow, to see how many phone numbers they could collect from passing women. Sometimes the tasks require physical teamwork and tandem concentration, as when the contestants were dropped off on a farm and instructed to move several surprisingly heavy bales of hay from here to there -- as much a challenge for skinny, bookish boys as for well-manicured girly-girls.

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