I watched the pilot episode of Chuck from Monday tonight. I had heard that it was going to be good, and wow was it not. I call it right now this show will be replaced mid season. This show felt like it was in the early ’90s in terms of how it portrayed computer geeks. That is a big no no if you want to attract geeks as an audience. Of course, targeting geeks at all, is a big turn off to just about every other demographic, which leaves the show with no one to watch it. Sure NBC will play some games, giving it the Heroes lead-in audience possibly (that would be a sign they desperately want to attract the geeks who like Heroes), but that won’t work because the writing is awful. They clearly do not have any geek consults at all. I will not tune in next week.
I’m sure all of you who care know by now that Luke made it through the 2nd episode of Beauty and the Geek. Jesse also made it, but there was 1 Ohio casualty, and unfortunately it was not Jasmine, but Amanda (and Tony). I liked Tony and Amanda, although possibly due to editing as all things on the show are, it seemed Amanda actually cared about him. One thing that someone I talked to suspected they were controlling is wardrobe. He or she (I forgot who it was exactly) refused to believe that the geeks really dressed that way (too geeky and with absolutely zero fashion sense), saying that the show must be giving them clothes to wear. Their primary complaint was with Jesse in the first episode. While not a lock, Luke’s sporting on one of our OSU FIRST shirts in the second episode hurts that claim.
The teams that won made a mistake in not picking Luke and Katie for elimination. So there are 2 events, geeks vs. geeks, and beauties vs. beauties. This means that 1 or most likely 2 teams will win these events. Each winning team gets to pick 1 team to put up for elimination. This is the first episode, so there is no past performance record to look at so you make the best decisions possible with your limited amount of information. In each event there was a clear second place team; because of Katie’s debate skills Luke and her were one such team, the other team was John the MIT guy and his girl (they did get picked). In the end the result was that a cute team who was no threat to anyone, at least initially, was eliminated, which makes the whole competition that much harder for everyone else. I can see some strategy in that, but I’m certain no such strategy was actually planned.