For Nerds, About Nerds?
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Every culture eventually gets a sitcom about them. Blacks had Amos and Andy. Obamans had the Cosby Show. Gays had Will and Grace, while closeted gays had Frazier. We nerds now have The Big Bang Theory (BBT), which accurately portrays us as the geniusly awkward socially lame man-boys that worship average looking chicks for their boob ownership.
Cute, sure. She’s not a real lesbian witch you know?
Johnny Galecki - Darlene’s boyfriend from Roseanne - plays Leonard , a Ph.D. that engages in niche interest activities with three friends whom are also doctors - like a quartet of Doogie Housers - in a Peter Pan world of geekery. Occasionally, he runs into cute across the hall neighbor Penny, Kaley Cuoco, and remembers he’s a man from the naughty tingles in his pee pee. She’s his motivation and mentor regarding mundane life, he’s her impotently platonic friend that takes her into his silly world. It’s like a reverse Dharma and Greg, but they aren’t fuck’in. If they did, according to most fiction, a hot dose of pussy would have Lenny drinking beer and watching football like a “real” dude. You know, because comics and other geek stuff contain no sexual content.
Very clichéd. There’s been a nerd versus nerd quiz episode. Several “maybe I should grow up so that she’ll like me” episodes. The asexual nerd best friend Sheldon versus the pretty chick love interest show. Going to a Halloween party, all the friends show up as the same super hero - Flash. Each 22 minute episode is brimming with jokes you can see coming a few seconds before they drop. Leonard tries to undue some computer virus Sheldon has sicked on Penny’s myspace. He fails, to which the superior geek comments “Resistance is futile”. l@m3!
Going up against NBC’s Chuck, another show about nerdetry but with a spy elements that I’m going to start watching, CBS’s BBT isn’t really a strong competitor, especially against a one-hour show. It’s hour neighbor isn’t much better, and just so happens to star Alyson Hannigan and Neil Patrick Haris - the Doogmeister himself.
Not impressive. It’s 11 pm. I’m off to bed after a mug of cocoa in my Spiderman pajamas under my Battlestar Galactica sheets - soiled from spanking it to Buffy.
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*sigh*
Once more we are treated to yet another shallow pander, it’s not even for us geeks, really. Even as anime is by J-town for J-town so that any interpretation of western culture is nearly unrecognizable, strained though the thick membrane of crack,
(Case in point:)
Even so, mainstream culture interpreting any subculture it is not party to for the entertainment of others in the mainstream become a hollow mockery of that which it depicts. Even when handled ostensibly with reverence, characters are two dimensional stereotypes, played for cheap laughs.
Lest I should be caught only complaining about the weather I will offer this solution: don’t go there in the first place.
Sure, I’d love to see more geek friendly television, but even those who claim to be dedicated to my cause don’t get it; I don’t want to fap to Olivia Munn, I want to fap to Allison Hannigan. (this is as good an excuse as any to reference this onion video again)
As far as I’m concerned, Heroes has done more to advance geek causes than Chuck ever will. Well, Ira, I guess you weren’t the man after all…
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I see your point about Heroes and Chuck. To me, the former showcases the interest of geek fascination portrayed dramatically, with a geek protagonist in the form of Hiro. Chuck is showing geek archtypes as part of it’s humor component. Laughing at us still. I’m sure it’s no coincidence one leads into the other.
“Fap” is getting added to da Dominary as the male counter point to Scratch’in your record. I like the onomatopoeiac nature of the term: “Fap, fap ,fap fap …”
Your sponsorship of Alyson into the Geek pantheon is approved, though I’d fap to Munn over Hannigan, but I’ll discuss it more on the forum.
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[quote]I see your point about Heroes and Chuck. To me, the former showcases the interest of geek fascination portrayed dramatically, with a geek protagonist in the form of Hiro. Chuck is showing geek archtypes as part of it’s humor component. Laughing at us still. I’m sure it’s no coincidence one leads into the other.[/quote]
Yes, that’s a big part of it. One other thing I will add is that geeks value immersion and as pointed out in Fear the Boot ep 125 (where I introduce the best card game ever
)immersion is often made or broken in the details. For example, NBC is something of a cruel mistress in this regards; setting us up to accept the wildly impossible then casting our suspension of disbelief on the rocky crags with insipid, plot advancing inaccuracies.
Makes immersion:
seemingly ordinary indiiduals have thier lives impacted by the emergance of metahuman abilities (Heroes)
Breaks immersion:
A macentosh G4 tower is dropped from a shelf roughly three feet off the ground, becomes irrevicably damaged (Chuck)
Makes immersion:
A vehicle produced by a major manufacturing company in a time of economic downturn, modified by a homland organization at a time when defense spending is hemorraging have together created a car that can dynamically alter its exterior and interior dimentions while human subjcts with in it are entirely unharmed. (Knight Rider)
Breaks immersion:
Within one episode a cop who has missed out on the last ten years of technological innovations *correctly* concludes that he can shut down an entire computer network by pouring coffie on a keyboard; on another occation enlists the help of an in-house geek (who’s stated geek cred is that he still lives with his parents) to help him extract a code hidden in *level 10* of a PS2 copy of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. (Life)
I wish I were making that last one up.
What I see all of this adding up to is while there may in fact be a genuine desire on the part of networks to branch out more and be more geek friendly; ultimately, they do so with all the insight and awareness of your average well intentioned grandmother. Yes, she loves you and has you in mind, but its still a hand knit reindeer wool sweater.
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Very true. I alluded to this very point in my last article on Heroes, invites then punishes immersion off and on to make a plot “work”. I read it as wanting to appeal to a niche highly intellectual audience yet being afraid of making it too “hard” for the majority of their viewers.
One of the things I enjoy about Beauty and the Geek is it’s balanced portrayal of the faults between the awkward nerds and the dumb-as-ditch-water beauties.
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