We haven’t had much of a turnout in the past with Beauty and the Geek threads but I thought I’d start one up anyway to discuss the new season opener.
They’ve shifted things around once again and now it’s Beauty Vs. the Geeks. My wife and I were watching this and she absolutely hates the concept. Her point is that the goal of the show is to have beauties and geeks grow together and that will never happen when it’s girls versus guys.
I, on the other hand, see no real problem with the new twist per se. But the implementation they used worries me.
First, girls and guys should still be paired up in rooms, or else it gets a bit too cliquey. Besides, that way it forces interaction.
Second, no matter how they try to equalize the event, one team will always have a distinct advantage. The telephone number one? Of course the girls won. “Ugly” or not, girls are girls and drunk guys will try to hit on them. Besides, girls are already used to flirting and asking for digits. The geeks aren’t.
Third (and this is the big one for me) it can’t just be a single team sending someone home. What happens if the geeks lose every challenge? Any attempt to force it back to equalization will feel fake. Besides, a one person elimination per week seems like a weak way to double the number of shows they get out of this crop.
I don’t know how you can choose one person from each team to eliminate and not make it a popularity contest, but if that can be solved, it should have been the way they chose to go this year. Without that, it’s a bunch of guys competing against a bunch of girls, no one growing and, really, why should I care?
But, of course, I’ll see how it plays out over the coming weeks.
I agree with your wife; beauties versus geeks is not the show I’ve been looking forward to. Have past seasons started with 9 teams? For some reason 10 feels like the number they should be starting with. It would have been more interesting if they’d left out the bickering between the women they showed at the end of the club evening and showed more interaction between the two groups.
Do you suppose the new format is a response to the horrible mismatch from last season? Jen and William, I think, were their names. That was painful to watch.
I’m hopeful they have another twist coming to get back to the pairs format.
I watched it for the fist time last season and got into it, but this year’s start totally escaped me. What day and time does it start?
Also - did anyone else get the feeling that the winning guy geek had hooked up with the second place girl geek in the time between the next to last show and the final, live show? They showed some scenes of the guy geek having a crush on her and wanting to ask her out, they both are in the Boston area, and they exchanged some looks during the final show.
Oh good, a thread on this. I’ve only managed to see a few minutes of this season.
Here’s what I thought: Starting them all off with a nighttime party was a bad idea. The women were all dressed up in minidresses and heavy makeup, and each one looked like a total skank, except for the one who will always look like a midwestern cheerleader no matter what costume they put her in.
The skank look is automatically off-putting. Bleagh.
Is that one geek openly gay?
From what I saw, it looked like there might have been two geeks who were quite good looking. They always seem to get eliminated early, though. I guess I should go to TWOP and get the rundown.
Oh, I seem to have completely missed the start of this season, I need to catch up. That said, I don’t like the idea of grouping the guys vs. the girls. I thought the most interesting bits of past seasons were the parts where everybody had to interact with their respective partner, and the different ways people went about it.
Long Time First Time, AFAIK, the crush thing was a bit played up by the powers to be and nothing much came of it. A couple of the geeks, including Dave and Nicole, were in the Beauty and the Geek thread over at the TWOP board discussing it (TWOP seems to have only one rather long thread among the reality show ones, so I don’t think they are reviewing the show, Enderw24). Well, if nothing has changed, and you’re interested, there’s always this website where you can leave an application…
I’m not a big fan of the beauties vs. geeks format, either, for the same reasons mentioned in the OP. It seems to go against the whole point of the show, and it’s impossible to come up with challenges that aren’t biased one way or the other.
Not only were the beauties obviously going to win the phone number challenge, the geeks were furthere hampered by the fact that the “gaysian” had to ask guys for their numbers, which is even harder than what the straight geeks had to do.
The “sweater vest” geek (wtf?) is very cute. I hope he doesn’t get kicked off for a while.
Yay geeks! Loved the way they sorted out how to do their talent show. Loved that they offered to help the beauties study. Especially loved Joe’s answer to Amber’s (I think that was her name) unpleasantness after the stair ceremony (goofy name). Such a drama queen won’t be missed.
It will be interesting to see if the beauties and geeks do pair up, though. Any bets on whether or not there will be a geek makeover week this season?