How bout Joel and Maggie on Northern Exposure?
Joel: xenophobic physician. Can’t drive a stick shift, doesn’t know to chop firewood despite living in a log cabin in Alaska. Despite this he takes his duties as a town physician seriously and may be the smartest of the bunch, even if he lacks some common sense (or perhaps he simply is the least crazy).
Maggie: bush pilot, likes to build airplanes and home DIY, kills bears and boyfriends on a regular basis. Thinks nothing of bivouacing in the middle of nowhere for a week or so.
Jamie Sommers and Oscar Goldman.
What was Jayne? Chopped liver?
Criminal Minds. Dr. Spencer Reid couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag, but the female agents all kick ass.
The Big Bang Theory. Penny outfights all the brillant guys.
A more relevant TV Tropes page is Action Girlfriend. (It’s sometimes hard to work out the right name of the trope over there.)
The setting is not uncommon in anime: one case where the male is very intellectual and the female is a very powerful fighter is Sumomo Mo Momo Mo, where the male (Koshi Inuzuka) is a high school student whose ambition is to become a lawyer, and the female (Momoko) is a tiny pink-haired girl in love with in Koshi – they are supposed to have an arranged marriage – and who has spent all her life training in martial arts, so that she can beat anyone else regardless of size or age.
Gabrielle wasn’t a man, though. I don’t think that partnership was a clear brains/brawn split either – Xena was depicted as intelligent and an excellent tactician, and Gabrielle learned to fight partway through the first season. Gabrielle’s big contribution to the team was that she had more emotional sensitivity and was thus better at dealing with situations that couldn’t be resolved through violence or cold logic.
I was thinking about The X-Files, but I’d say the Mulder and Scully duo doesn’t fit the brains/brawn model either. It was more logic/intuition, although it did reverse the more traditional logical man and intuitive woman trope.
This is what I came to say. I still like the (soon-to-be-over) show, but I think the “I know kung fu” scene at the end of season 2 was, IMO, the beginning of the end for Chuck.
Not as uncommon as I thought. Thanks.
Boy, Adam Baldwin can’t get no love in this thread at all.
Johnny Mnemonic.
I’m guessing Sr Siete means Mal and Zoe during their Browncoat years.
Kim Possible? ::clicks on action girlfriend link:: D’oh.
The whole point of THE MENTALIST is that Patrick is the brains – it’s right there in the title! – who solves crimes that baffle gun-toting special agent Teresa Lisbon, who in turn pretty much bodyguards the genius in between slapping the cuffs on the bad guys.
****Psych - Shawn uses his mental abilities to solve crimes, and his girlfriend Juliet is one of the cops who do the heavy lifting.
Eerily similar! A virtual carbon copy!
Okay, how about FRINGE, where special agent Olivia Dunham (a) routinely defers to genius Peter Bishop and thin-line-between-madness-and-genius Walter Bishop on scientific questions during their increasingly weird investigations but (b) is the go-to one of the three when there’s gun-totin’ special-agentin’ to be done?
Leela and the fourth Doctor Who
Yea, but in her Crystal Singer stories, her lead traveled several times on ships where the ship “Brain” was male and the walkabout partner “Brawn” was female.
Of course, in that one the woman has fighting-implants and -enhancements. Including metallic claws that can be extended from beneath her fingernails, IIRC.
Can we count SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, where Lex Luthor was routinely accompanied by his kickboxing bodyguard Mercy Graves?