The Pioneer Times

Issue date: 3/6/07 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: http://www.tv.com/beauty-and-the-geek/show/

A man walks down the street, minding his own business, when the sidewalk jumps out at him. Well, not actually. He just trips, falls and lands on his face. Instead of the pang of sympathy you would expect to feel, do you oftentimes find yourself holding back a grin when someone trips over his or her own feet? Or are you the kind of person who has a morbid fascination with other people's misfortune? If so, you are probably a fan of reality television.

I'm not Cruella Deville, but I can honestly say that I delight in other people's misery from time to time. I may be a sadist but I am not a complete sociopath; I do not injure others and I do not enjoy placing small animals into burlap bags and tossing them into rivers. While I do not tolerate seeing friends and family attacked or ridiculed, make it a complete stranger and I am rolling on the floor with laughter.

With the reality show format rapidly becoming the norm, it's getting more difficult to find a quality reality show that both entertains me and satisfies my need for others' displeasure. Beauty and the Geek, now in its third season, specifically appeals to me because of my fair hair. I know that this show doesn't just appeal to me; the debut on Jan. 3 nearly five-million viewers.

This show is meant to be a "social experiment" that pairs eight beautiful bimbos, who lack smarts, and eight otherwise intelligent men whose lack of social graces provides the "geek" factor. They competed for $250,000, by educating both the bucks and bimbos; the ladies taught the men how to act appropriately around females while the geeks taught the beauties subjects such as aeronautics, the study of flight and space travel, for a museum tour they provided.

In the end, both groups learned from each other; the men learned to talk to women and be less socially awkward, while the women learned actual knowledge, and in the end, aimed to defeat the stereotypes of stupid, attractive women.

Among the geeks' challenges was sketching a drawing of a nude model. The intent of this challenge was not to see who had the best artistic ability, but to see who paid attention to the model talk and who would best retain what she said. In each episode, the beauties and the geeks competed with their respective sex to avoid the elimination room; the winner from the each sex chose which two teams went head-to-head to evade eviction from the mansion and the show.

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