A New Must See
Must Add to the Season Pass

So one of my students E=MC2 (as she likes to go by now) told me I needed to watch "Beauty & the Geek" on "the new CW." In my head, I was reluctant, because I thought how could any show on "the new CW" be good without Tyra Banks. I mean come on people can Ashton Kutcher's "Beauty & the Geek" even compare to "America's Next Top Model."

So last night, I sat down with TiVo to watch the Encore season 3 premiere of the show (yes, season 3 and I am just jumping on board, I know what you are thinking.) So here is the gist of the show: it's a reality show, go figure. The basics, for those of you like me who didn't know, are they team up a "geek" i.e. Harvard, MIT: Math Science Grads. They have a myriad of hobbies like collecting 35,000 comic books, being the lead singer of the a Star Wars Tribute Band, a Trekky (no I mean Trekker, which I learned is the appropriate term) and the list goes on. The beauties are swimsuit models, beauty queens etc. and let's say they are not so smart.

So they beauty and geeks are teamed up together as partners. It's almost a blind pick. They then compete in challenges: the beauties are given intellectual challenges and the geeks get social ones. In this episode the first challenge was for the beauties to find three books in the library using the Dewey Decimal System. It was much more difficult than it sounds... well for these girls at least. Then when the got the books and gave them to their partner there were tasks in each of their books that the "geek" had to complete. 1. Get someone to rub sunscreen on your back. 2. Get a girl's number. 3. Borrow a cell phone to make a call. Well needless to say it was painfully amusing.

Then the teams got a chance to decide if they really wanted to be there or take a $20K buyout. Well no one took the buyout so they got their next assignment, which they had the night to prepare. The guys had to do a comedy routine, which I think is hard regardless if you are a geek or not. I couldn't see how the girls would do any better. The girls got to interview the author of "Freakonomics." Well some of the guys were mildly funny, while the others BOMBED. Like the little Asian guy name Piao pronounced Pi, like the number, got up and told the most foul jokes ever. You could hear a pin drop. The audience picked the winner.

Then the girls, who many were quoted saying "look at all these words" about the book prior to the interview did even worse than the stand-up. They had a horrible time with the prompter. The word enigmatic really stumped them. Well as I am sure you figured most sucked it up. Two of them did a surprisingly good job. In this one two TV journalist (ok I know what my newspaper friends from Mizzou are thinking... and stop) picked the winner.

Then two people Sinjay & Tori where voted off at the end. All and all it was freaking hilarious! I mean, I feel that my description doesn't do it justice. So get a season pass on the TiVo and watch it. Its regular time is Wednesday nights.

Next Post: You can TiVo it, but you NEED to find it and watch it! Arrested Development