Friday, January 13, 2006

Thoughts on Beauties & Geeks

I watch very little reality television (unless it involves paint & wallpaper, or topsoil and perennials), but I watched the "Beauty and the Geek" television show last night because I'm still fighting the Cold That Won't Go Away and didn't feel like doing anything but sitting in a chair and staring straight ahead, and one of the "geeks" (Wes) on the show is the friend of the son of a friend, and several thoughts occurred to me.

First, this show was the brainstorm of Ashton Kutcher, so of course it would be about gorgeous women and geeky guys, because Ashton is a guy and would obviously be interested in looking at gorgeous women.

Then I thought about the show "The Bachelor" where one guy picks from among a dozen or so women, and how they turned it around for "The Bachelorette" where one woman picks from among a bunch of hunky guys. And I wondered...

What if they did "Beauty and the Geek" with brilliant, geeky women and hot, not-so-bright men? My daughter is one of those brilliant, geeky women, with two degrees in mathematics and applications in for PhD programs in statistics--she's also gorgeous and married, but that's beside the point, which is that I know just as many geeks who are women as I do geeks who are men. (Wes on the show reminds me very much of my daughter's husband...) And I know an awful lot of attractive, but rather ditzy men as well. But would it work?

I think part of the appeal of the show is that the women have their insecurities as well. If the roles were reversed, though, how would the studly dumb guys react to being shown up by women who were smarter? Would they be able to handle it? Would they put the women down for being less attractive? Would anybody be willing to watch it?

What do you think? Would Ashton have the guts to reverse the roles? Should he? Or is this just a premise for someone's romance novel?

1 comment:

JoAnn Ross said...

First of all, of course all TV, even reality shows aren't real life, but I discovered this show last year because a review in USA Today told me it was actually a gentle, nice show and I was surprised by how much each group had taught each other by the end. And a lot of the women are actually intelligent with difficult degrees (one of this season's candidates is majoring in math communications, whatever that is, and another - the former Hooters girl turned beer rep, I think -- graduated with a double major.) And they all seem, as they did last year, genuinely interested in helping the geeks learn social skills. I believe a large part of the success of the show is really good candidate selection. It wouldn't work if you had some horrible, self-centered "beauties." Btw, I liked Wes the laser monkey tracker; hopefully we'll see more of him.

Of course the women would be put down for being less attractive if the show was reversed. But don't we also put down the geeky hair cuts on the guys and that shirt buttoned up to the throat? As for the studly dumb guys being shown up by a smart woman, Anderson once asked me to do one of my rare booksignings for a supermarket opening. It was a couple days before Christmas, so I was signing stacks of books for presents, and at the end of the gig, I had a couple copies left over and suggested to the drive time radio stud who was broadcasting from on site that he ought to buy a book and give it to his girlfriend. He said -- on the air -- that none of his girlfriends could read because he refused to date any woman who was smarter than he was. LOL