The Crying Game
A new iteration of Beauty and the Geek is upon us, and already the learning has begun. By the end of the season, 10 geeks will know they have more to offer the world than their geekiness. (There's also, for example, their dorkiness.) Ten beauties will be fully versed in the knowledge that hanging out with geeks on TV for a few weeks does about as much to advance one's singing/acting/cigar-modeling career as learning Swahili. Oh, the humanity!
And, oh, the tears! Reality TV is the most water-logged genre since Jacques Cousteau went off the air, and Beauty and the Geek is arguably the wettest of the bunch. In this season's second episode, Tony, a bow-tied, tongue-tied medical student who barely managed to utter a few dozen words during his brief time on the show, started bawling like a clinically depressed lawn sprinkler when he and his partner were eliminated. Thank goodness he only lasted a day or so in the house; if he'd had, say, a week to discover new, untapped facets of himself, we might have had another Katrina situation on our hands.
This season, the big twist is that one of the beauties is a dude and one of the geeks is a lady. Theoretically, this will lead to even more learning and more weeping, so be warned. In the meantime, give credit to the show's producers for being amongst the most daring in the business. They've found some incredibly awkward nerds this time around, and some staggeringly vapid hotties. As any veteran showrunner of a mediocre sitcom will be happy to testify, the creakier the stereotype, the bigger the laff. But what happens when the geeks are so socially inept and the beauties so cerebrally flat-chested that you get almost no usable footage?
In the first learning experiences of the new season, the geeks had to write and perform a rap song, and the beauties had to debate each other on weighty, super-intellectual topics such as lowering the minimum drinking age. In both cases, mute, uncomfortable silence was the too-frequent result, and while the show's editors may have enjoyed the challenge of cutting from dead air to dead air to dead air, the challenge of watching it was no fun at all.
Alas, picking on Beauty and the Geek is like picking on a Mormon missionary. The show's so earnest and heartfelt and determined to make the world a happier, more harmonic place where we all value each other a little bit more, that you just want it to succeed. And every once in a while, when a beauty happily declares,"I like shaking my butt at people," or a geek calls his mom on his cellphone and enlists her to be his wingman, you can't help but be touched by the charming inanity and the poignant gawkiness.
So grow, clumsy little geeklings, grow, into great big self-actualized swan-geeks! We're rooting for you! And learn, semi-literate Hooters Girls, learn! (But not so much that a career in astrophysics begins to sound more fulfilling than serving shots of Jagermeister to drunken assholes. That would be bad.) Most of all, weep! Cry like there's no tomorrow! Your geeky, poorly educated tears help those of us watching at home feel like we're growing and learning just a little bit too.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]