It seems like half the people who write to me want to know how staged the TV show is. For example:
I have watched several episodes of the previous “Beauty and the Geek” contestants before, and sometimes I can’t help but wonder if some of the “geeks” and “beauties” actually over-exaggerate their dorky or airheaded tendencies.
“Are the beauties really that dumb?” “Are the geeks really that nerdy?” I got asked those questions before the first episode even aired, and I wasn’t really sure what to say. Having now seen an episode, I can honestly say – the show hasn’t even begun to capture it.
No one on my season was a good enough actor/actress to fake a personality 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the entire duration of the show. Everything you see is who we are.
Undoubtably, the editing process molds, exaggerates, and simplifies our characters, but it’s helped by the fact that nearly every person in that house was a little bit crazy. Some more than others, but overall, lunacy abounded.
I was actually a little surprised when I saw the premiere – if anything, people’s personalities have been rather understated so far. More on this tomorrow.
Being famous feels a lot like not being famous. I thought about doing an extra line of coke to celebrate, but the stripper was getting impatient and all the lines blend together after the fourth or fifth anyway.
Just kidding, haha. Drugs aren’t cool, stay in school, kids.
Actually, I woke up around noon the day after the premiere and spent the next two hours answering emails from friends and fans, adding new friends on Myspace and Facebook, and returning phone calls from past students who think it’s hilarious that I’m officially one of the eight geekiest guys in the country. Those were fun conversations.
I don’t feel like my character on the show has been fully developed yet. At least, I hope not, because so far I’m just the guy who likes boobs. Which is true, but there are other aspects to my personality as well.
Anyway, I’ve got one last weekend to relax before I jump back into reality on Monday. I’m spending this weekend in at a reunion in Tahoe. Take 30 very, very outgoing guys and girls, add two cabins and a lot of alcohol, then mix liberally with hundreds of locals and tourists out looking for a good time. This will only end well.
Turns out it’s kinda weird watching yourself on TV.
I didn’t sleep at all the night before the Beauty and the Geek premiere. I stayed up late packing and tried to grab a couple hours of shuteye before my airport shuttle arrived at 4 am, but with no success. I stumbled my way to the gate, where I devoured a breakfast burrito that was way more delicious than any combination of salsa, eggs, and potatoes should have been that early in the morning.
I spent most of the the flight back to California half asleep. By which I mean that I alternated between fully asleep and fully awake as my seatmates, Mr. and Mrs. “I have a bladder the size of a kumquat but I still find it necessary to drink a cup of coffee every five minutes”, squeezed past me to use the bathroom over and over again.
So I was still slightly stupefied when I finally got together with a few friends to watch the show. That may be part of why it didn’t feel real. It still doesn’t feel real. It felt like watching a home video with a bunch of friends, except that I came home afterwards to discover an unusually high number of friend requests on Myspace.
There hasn’t been much character development yet, but the little pieces they’ve shown captured us pretty accurately for the most part. (Tori had a bit of a rough episode, unfortunately. She’s still an awesome person in my book.) It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds. For my part, people are already asking me if I was playing up the geekiness. Which makes me laugh, because I thought I came off a lot cooler than I expected.
I wish they showed more of the standup comedy! There’s a lot of stuff from the house that I still don’t know about – I’m going to have to wait to see it on TV, too. That includes everyone’s standup routines. I’ve heard Mario’s, and most of Nate’s, and I know what got bleeped out of Paio’s (hahaha, I’m actually surprised they were able to air as much of his as they did). But Scooter’s routine remains a mystery.
And of course all one-on-one interviews with the camera were kept private. So no one knows for sure who was backstabbing who until the episode actually airs. So much drama. I can’t wait for next week!
All the waiting is finally over. I’m going to be on TV! The fact that I was chosen from 25,000 nerds as one of the 8 geekiest guys in the United States of America dampens my enthusiasm just a little bit. But not much!
I was actually going to be in midair between DC and San Francisco when the premiere aired (I booked my flight a while ago and the CW likes to leave us out of the loop as much as possible), so yesterday I bit the bullet and paid the extra money to change my flight around. Originally I was just going to try going standby all day, but with all the extra traffic from President Ford’s funeral, I figured a reservation was a good idea.
Season 3 of Beauty and the Geek begins tonight at 8 pm with a special two-hour episode. Some tips to help you get the most out of your evening:
- Play the “Niels is on Beauty and the Geek” drinking game, invented just for this occasion by my friend Daniel. It’s so simple, even a non-geek can play it! Rules:
- Take a drink every time I say something.
- (optional) If it turns out I’m not getting any airtime, take a drink every time anybody else says something.
(To all you underage fans, enjoy your apple juice!)
- Put some money on it. I’m betting on Mike. He’s going all the way!
bookmakers look at betting on reality TV as a gateway drug – an apparently harmless class C option they hope will lead to a lifetime gambling habit.
–The Guardian
- Get a sexy T-shirt. Such as this one-of-a-kind design, as well suited for a Wednesday night in front of the television as it is for the catwalks of Milan. Made for me by a very special relative, I like it because it was made with love. And copyright violations.
Tomorrow’s the premiere of Beauty and the Geek, season three. Several million people will watch me, and judge me. A sobering thought.
I’m spending my last day before fake-stardom at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. I’m excited! I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, but never actually got around to it. I hear you get to crawl through ventilation ducts, there’s peepholes so you can spy on the people in the restaurant below, and all sorts of James Bond-style gadgetry that was actually used at the height of the Cold War.
Examine over 200 spy gadgets, weapons, bugs, cameras, vehicles, and technologies. Learn about microdots and invisible ink, buttonhole cameras and submarine recording systems, bugs of all sizes and kinds, and ingenious disguise techniques developed by Hollywood for the CIA.
This is going to be so sweet.
