Les Nessman, from WKRP in Cincinnati.
Interesting assortment. I wouldn’t have thought to include Ross Geller or the Professor, but they do fit. the profile. I’m not so sure about MacGyver or Harry Stone (not socially inept enough), and definitely not Radar O’Reilly (not intellectual enough; he’s more the “naive farmboy” stereotype). Les Nessman? Maybe. If I count him, I wonder if I should also include Cliff Clavin…
I never heard of The IT Crowd. I did think of Head of the Class, but despite the claim, I couldn’t really buy any of them (other that Arvid) as nerds. They were mostly too stylish and not quirky enough.
The reason I brought it up is that I once had a discussion with someone who claimed that he wouldn’t watch *TBBT *because it made fun of nerds. I thought the opposite. *TBBT *is the first sitcom I’ve watched that seemed to “get” nerd subculture (this was about five years ago). The science was real (discussions of Schroedinger’s Cat, string theory, and loop quantum gravity, as opposed to inventions like “transformation chambers”), the geek culture references are real (I’ve had arguments that paralleled the ones on the show about how Superman gets his costume clean, and the practical implications of Green Lantern’s vulnerability to yellow), and I’ve actually known (and/or been) each of those guys at different points in my life.
The thing is, we both got stuck when trying to back up our positions by citing TV nerds of the past. Looks like they’re more varied than I thought.
I hate to tell you this, but the Doctor (well, that Doctor) is a nerd as well.
Denton wasn’t – he was a “typical teenager” a la Archie. However, Phil Boynton (Miss Brooks’ love interest) was something of the absent minded professor type.
This is before TV, but both Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve fit the stereotype.
Was Screech a “nerd” or just “the weird kid”? It’s been so long since I’ve seen Saved By the Bell I don’t really remember.
Like Patty Duke’s boyfriend Richard. They always seemed pretty nerdy to me, even when I was ten years old.
The younger brother and his 2 friends on “Freaks and Geeks” were all nerds, or were they just geeks?
Ernie on My Three Sons (the one who was adopted) was originally kind of a nerd as well. That’s why he wore those thick horn-rimmed glasses, the standard nerd flag back then.
I remember in one episode of It Takes a Thief, super-hot Sharon Acker (Odonna in ST: TOS’s “Mark of Gideon”) was a kind of nerdy female in horn-rimmed glasses with her hair up in a bun. All she did was let her hair down and take off the glasses and BAM! she’s able to bluff her way past a whole contingent of East Bloc border guards!
Garibaldi from B5? Tech savvy and a Daffy Duck portrait over his bed.
Millhouse, “I’m not a nerd, nerds are smart.”
Geordi Laforge.
Austin James from Probe maybe isn’t so iconic, and not stereotypical, but definitely an Asimovian nerd. Parker Stevenson also had been Frank Hardy, but I guess the Hardy boys themselves aren’t really nerdy.
Jerry Steiner from Parker Lewis was a nerd, and while he was treated as an outsider, his friends always seemed to have genuine respect for him. A lot of the reason why that show was good is that it didn’t consider any of its characters as less than human.
He built a robot butler/friend so I’d have to say “nerd”. Also, his friends outside the SBtB core group were all stereotypical taped-glasses and pocket protector style nerds.
One thing is a change in what nerds do from the past. Back in the SBtB days if you wanted a cheap laugh, you’d have the nerd guy say he was going to spend Friday night at a lecture about quarks or organizing his rock collection. These days it’s more pop-culture and they’d be playing Dungeons & Dragons, some World of Warcraft convention or attending a debate on Kirk vs Picard.
Niles Crane.
Penelope on Criminal Minds.
Yup. Not only by behaviour, but explicitly described as nerds
Josh Saviano as Paul Pfeiffer on the Wonder Years
If you’re going to count Arvid you have to count Dennis. They were the fat & skinny nerds. And while Simone wasn’t a computer nerd she was an art & poetry nerd. Jawaharlal was a nerd.
There was a whole mix of people in the advanced class but it wouldn’t be fun or believable if there weren’t more than at least one nerd.
My god I miss that show.
If we wanna go waay back, how about Zelda Gilroy from “Dobie Gillis”. Very intelligent and studious, with a strong vocabulary (she said she and Dobie would eventually get together because of “propiniquity”), and certainly not conventionally attractive. Although she might have been too assertive in her personality to be a true nerd.
Matthew Brock (NewsRadio)
I don’t think of Cliff Clavin as a stereotypical nerd. Yes, he’s a font of useless knowledge, and somewhat socially inept, but I don’t think he has the rest of the “brainy” part of the stereotype – he knows a lot of facts, but it’s not like he’s a big thinker, or knows how to apply that knowledge to anything, except maybe for appearing on “Jeopardy”. 
Les Nessman, admittedly, isn’t terribly smart, either, though he has several of the other stereotypes: classic “98-pound weakling” build, socially awkward (particularly among women), utterly clueless about sports, and, of course, the bowtie.
My impression was that Les was extremely well-informed about an extremely narrow subject (farm news). That, combined with his total lack of sports knowledge, makes me think he qualifies as a nerd.