ShareThisBy ROB OWEN
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Even before a trio of teen geeks raked in box-office gold in the summer movie hit "Superbad," TV was poised for its geekiest fall yet.
After last year's breakout hits with nerdy characters -- Betty Suarez (America Ferrera) on ABC's "Ugly Betty" and Hiro Nakamura (Masi Oka) on NBC's "Heroes" -- it was only a matter of time before viewers would begin to see these everymen (and women) everywhere, including these four new shows, three of which air simultaneously:
--"Chuck" (8 p.m. EDT Monday, NBC, premieres Sept. 24): Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) works at a Buy More electronics store as part of the Nerd Herd that diagnoses and fixes computers. But his life changes when he opens an e-mail filled with government secrets that download to his brain, leading him to become a government agent in this action-comedy.
--"The Big Bang Theory" (8:30 p.m. Monday, CBS, premieres Sept. 24): Brilliant physicists Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) live together, pine for the dim bulb next door (Kaley Cuoco) and hang with their nerdy CalTech scientist friends, Howard (Simon Helberg) and Rajesh (Kunal Nayyar).
--"Aliens in America" (8:30 p.m. Monday, The CW, premieres Oct. 1): Outcast 16-year-old Justin Tolchuck (Dan Byrd) has few friends and isn't one of the cool kids, so his mom (Amy Pietz, "Caroline in the City") tries to import a friend. Everyone is surprised when the exchange student is not a blond Norwegian, as pictured in the brochures, but Raja Musharaff (Adhir Kalyan), a 16-year-old Muslim from a small village in Pakistan.
--"Reaper" (9 p.m. Tuesday, The CW, premieres Sept. 25): When underemployed big box store employee Sam (Bret Harrison, "The Loop") turns 21, he learns his parents sold his soul to the devil. When Sam isn't playing video games or at his dead end job, he hangs with slacker pal Bert "Sock" Wysocki (Tyler Labine, "Invasion").
Already there's the CW reality show "Beauty and the Geek" (season premiere Sept. 18), which pairs brainy guys with beautiful-but-not-so-smart women, and even on the ABC Family series "Greek," the male lead isn't a cocky frat boy, it's an insecure curly-haired kid, Rusty (Jacob Zachar).
Then there's the annual San Diego Comic-Con, a long-running event that began. humbly, as a gathering place for fans of comic books. Now it's a showcase for media companies to peddle their upcoming movies and TV shows every July, and fans who've never cracked a comic book show up in droves.
Why the geekapalooza? It's a combination of coincidence, TV having success and copying itself and writers getting in touch with their inner nerd.
"As a writer, you want to write what you know," said Josh Schwartz, executive producer of "Chuck." He helped launch TV's geek ascendancy with Seth Cohen (Adam Brody), the indie-music-loving outcast on "The O.C." "We know many more writers who resemble Chuck than, say, Jack Bauer. Just saying."
The Chuck character may also be more relatable. Viewers may wish they could be as daring as Jack Bauer, but in reality, they're more likely to identify with Chuck's awkwardness.
"Big Bang Theory" co-creator Chuck Lorre said the show began as an effort to write about people with remarkable minds, not as a geekfest.
"The comedy is in their inability to deal with everything that we take for granted," Lorre said.
Co-creator Bill Prady, a former computer programmer, said he was inspired by people he's known in real life, including former co-workers and his father-in-law, a pediatric rheumatologist who wrote the protocol for treating lupus in adolescents.
"He has an unbelievable mind, but doesn't understand that discussing my wife's cycle at the Thanksgiving table is socially incorrect," Prady said. "I'll say, 'Graham, maybe that's not the kind of thing that's appropriate.' And he'll say, 'But it's a natural human function, just like eating, which we're doing here at the table.'"
Rob Owen can be reached at rowen(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com
