[Televisionary]

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. I'm still a little tired after staying up to watch Fringe last night after attending the Los Angeles premiere of Doubt , starring Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. (Verdict? A good film but not a great one.) NBC has confirmed a long-standing rumor and announced that Rashida Jones ( The Office ) has been cast in the untitled Amy Poehler workplace comedy project from Greg Daniels and Michael Schur that isn't a spin-off to The Office . Jones will play Ann Logan, a nurse whose boyfriend has suffered a strange injury that leads her to the characters played by Poehler and Aziz Ansari. Do they work in a specialized medical clinic? A psychiatrist's office? Witch doctor's emporium? That remains to be seen but I am happy that Jones and Poehler will appear together in this project. I've missed Jones, especially since her last Office visit. The series is expected to be ready by late spring but may not ...

... and I won't be sticking around to watch it. Is anyone else just totally over this once-fantastic now unwatchable series? Sad. I don't care about gratuitous twists, skanky contestants that appear willing to bed the geeks in order to stay in the house, or why the producers feel that they need to shake up a winning formula by introducing such drivel and undermining their own brand. I'm out.

Sigh. Going into this season of Beauty and the Geek , I was already not entirely happy with this series' latest "loud" twist: that instead of the pattern we've come to know and love about Beauty and the Geek , the hapless geeks wouldn't be paired with beauties this time around. Instead, the geeks would face off against the beauties in a sort of war of the sexes. Puhlease. I understand the need for reality series to keep their formats fresh but I don't understand why the producers of this typically charming series--whose basic, inspirational/aspirational structure has been a standout among the increasingly trashy reality genre--feel the need to constantly mess around with what essentially works about the series. Last season's male beauty/female geek twist worked despite itself (or possibly because female geek Nicole was so gosh darn awkwardly cute), but this latest game change just grates from the start and seems to go against everything the series is meant...

I'm thrilled with the results of this season's Beauty and the Geek . If last week's blunt post about my support for Dave and Jasmine wasn't strongly worded enough, let me make it absolutely clear: I've been rooting for these two for a while now. And while their victory wasn't much of a surprise last night (call me crazy but was the opening of those two envelopes completely anticlimactic?), the reunion/reveal episode of Beauty and the Geek was just kooky and, well, creepy enough to keep things a little interesting. It was nice for a change to see if the geeks were keeping up with their physical transformations and I do have to say that I was surprised to see that they all had clearly taken on board the lessons and skills they learned from their participation and had applied them to their everyday lives. (Yes, I too was happy to see that Jesse smartly lost the Billy Idol platinum 'do and went back to brown.) As for the beauties, it does seem that their learn...

There, I said it. I've made it known where my allegiances are: squarely with Dave and Jasmine. Last night's final elimination room on Beauty and the Geek proved not to be that at all, instead for the first time "in the history of Beauty and the Geek " booting the final two teams back to their hometowns for a change, allowing them the opportunity to see their teammates in their natural habitat. It was a nice twist in a reality competition that seems hellbent on redefining its own rules and twists, what with cash on the table to walk away (which no one actually ever picked up), a male beauty and a female geek this season, and the final twist: that "America" would decide who would walk away with the $250,000 prize. (Half of me just wanted the adorably clueless Jasmine to ask if Ugly Betty herself really had that much sway over their final fate.) It's pretty remarkable to me to see just how far Dave and Jasmine have come over the course of the season, con...

I'm a sucker for the loopy charms of CW's Beauty and the Geek , so I was curious to see how this season's well-publicized "twist" would play out and how it would throw the social experiment into upheaval. For those of you not in the know, that "twist" is the inclusion for the first time ever (or as the host emphatically put it, "in the history of Beauty and the Geek ") that a female geek and a male beauty have been introduced into the game. Sure, it's not the biggest spanner in the works ever to hit a reality series, but it does cut through to the heart of the series' overaching premise: the tug of war between brains and beauties. I think it's about time that a female geek--in dire need of a makeover from the look of the socks n' shoes combo she was sporting in the season premiere--received the benefits of some social adjustments. As for the himbo they brought in as the first male beauty (who just screams stripper), it will be i...

Call me a hopeless romantic or a reality TV junkie, but I can't get enough of Beauty and the Geek . And even though this season has been a little lackluster compared to the last two seasons, I've been hooked nonetheless. On tonight's season finale, the final two teams--Scooter and Megan vs. Nate and Cece--will go head to head in the final elimination challenge. But this being reality TV, there's a twist, one possibly involving the former ousted contestants. (One can hope so, anyway.) I really do want Nate to win this competition but half of me hopes he doesn't just so I can see the look on Cece's face when Scooter and Megan walk away with the cash. Cece is, in my eyes, one of the very worst people to ever pop up on a reality TV series (and that's saying a lot when you've got a category already filled by Boston Rob, Johnny Fairplay, and the cast of Real World: Las Vegas ) and I cringe every time she shows up on screen. Her near abuse of that poor Chihuahu...

There are some guilty pleasures that are just that... truly sinful television encounters that you watch alone in the dark, with the curtains drawn, afraid to ever dare mention to anyone the following day that you tune in to this show, much less have a TiVo Season Pass. And then there are guilty pleasures that you can't help but blab about endlessly to any and all who will hear, in the hopes that you can persuade them too to tune in and watch the show. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am talking about the CW's reality series/"social experiment" Beauty & the Geek , currently airing at 8 pm on Wednesdays. I'll admit that when the series first launched three seasons ago, I was a little wary and thought that Reality TV Svengali Ashton Kutcher would present a geek-spoitation and social punking that the world had never seen. And, yet, after three seasons of challenges, unrequited crushes , and lame introductions from charisma-short host Mike Richards, I am still just as ...

I'll admit that I was more than skeptical at first when I heard the premise of the WB's reality show, Beauty & the Geek . Perhaps it was the fact that the promos kept billing the show as "Ashton Kutcher's social experiment," a dubious endorsement to say the least. (His marriage to Demi more than fits the bill as "social experiment," but that's not for here.) The concept is pretty basic: six geeks (intellectually advanced yet socially awkward guys) and six beauties (gorgeous yet, er, intellectually challenged girls) are picked to live in a mansion. Sounds rather like MTV's Real World at first, no? But here's the twist: the girls and guys will be paired into teams of two and will compete each week for the priviledge of staying and continuing the experiment... and for the opportunity to win $250,000 at the end. Each week, the geeks and the beauties are forced to compete in various challenges; the winners of which get to decide which teams to...