Thanks to waiting for Talk Show with Spike Feresten, I’ve been watching Beauty and the Geek, which occupies the timeslot just before it. And it occurred to me that part of its appeal (besides the morbid fascination we all have in watching good-looking women put up dweebs so ugly you can’t help but look) lies in the home audience knowing the answers to challenges posed to both beauties and geeks.

A lot of popular TV relies on the home viewer identifying strongly with the content, either in it mirroring real life, or parodying an undercurrent of society we know is there but can’t put a finger on (think: Seinfeld).

In the case of Beauty and the Geek, the elimination-style reality show rings bells with the audience simply because it’s. so. simple. You’d have to be a martian not to know the answers to the challenges.

Inexplicably, it’s rocket science for the participants (half of which, incidentally, probably understand rocket science). The beauties are baffled by the simplest questions. The geeks are floored by regular pop culture references that everyone, no really, everyone should know.

Here are some examples: Beauty fails at knowing what the NYSE stands for. In spite of a picture of the stock exchange being flashed. (Her Geek sweats bullets in the background.)

Next question stumps Beauty for a while. But she hesitates a meek guess at, “Yen?” in response to what the Japanese unit of currency is. She wins ONE MEELLION DOLLARS. Ha ha ha. Okay, she doesn’t, but she does get to stay in the competition.

Then it goes to her Geek. Several clues begging to be picked up later, he fails to identify Everybody Hates Chris as Chris Rock’s loose comedic biography.

The thing is, the questions asked of Beauty aren’t scientific or particularly dorky. The opposite is also true: the questions asked of Geek aren’t about social awareness or fashion or looks or whatever it is Geeks aren’t supposed to know.

The questions are really answerable by anyone who’d pick up the papers now and then. It’s not real knowledge; it’s not even general knowledge. It’s just what’s around you.

How did they manage to find people so extreme in what they did know and what they didn’t?

Oddly, as ‘far apart’ and ‘different’ as they’re meant to be positioned, Beauty and Geek actually really are the same—people so pigeonholed in one aspect, spending their time alienated from anything in this world, that really, you couldn’t find two more alike segments of the population.

They don’t exist in the real world. I wonder if they even exist outside TV.