The Vintage Reader

My 13 Favorite TV Guy Geeks

1. Jake Foley (Christopher Gorham), Jake 2.0.


2. First-season Henry (also Christopher Gorham), Ugly Betty. Henry lost points with me this season for behaving stupidly and inconsistently. I completely lost interest in the show and quit watching, so I don't know if his behavior has improved or not.


3. The 9th Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who.


4. Okay, okay. The 10th Doctor (David Tennant), Doctor Who. I didn't like him much in his first season, but I like him a lot better now.


5. Leonard (Johnny Galecki), Big Bang Theory. Here I differ from Lisa, who listed Sheldon; while I think Sheldon is hilarious, I would never want him in my living room, so he didn't make the list. (I also liked Johnny Galecki as David, Darlene's boyfriend/husband in Roseanne, but I didn't watch the show enough to know whether David belongs on the list or not)


6. Dwayne Wayne (Kadeem Hardison), A Different World. At first Dwayne Wayne got on my nerves, but as the seasons went on he grew on me, as geek guys often will. He had the same effect on Whitley.


7. Rom (Max Grodenchik), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I loved Rom. He was an engineer working as a waiter who quietly went about doing his job and loving his son, his brother, and a beautiful woman who eventually married him. For me, Trek characters usually don't count as geeks; when everybody on the show is a geek, nobody stands out. But DS9, not being set on a starship where everyone went to the Academy to learn some specific aspect of geekery, was different.


8. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alexis Denisof), Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wesley all desperate and tough-guy: oh my. EDIT: I think the desperate tough-guy Wesley was more Angel than Buffy, actually.


9. Doogie Howser, M.D. (Neil Patrick Harris), from the show of the same name. I liked Doogie a lot, and I love it all the more that NPH grew up to play Barney in How I Met Your Mother, and also, both Jim Burden in My Antonia and some freaky heterosexual version of himself in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. He's crazy! You never know what he'll do next!


10. Ed Stevens (Thomas Cavanagh), Ed.


11. Dr. Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula), Quantum Leap.


12. Richie Velch (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), The Class. Another short-lived series that I really liked. Richie's horrible wife was played wonderfully by Sara Gilbert, who has played Johnny Galecki's love interest in TWO shows now, which must put her in some special category of Most Likely to Play the Significant Other of a Geek.


13. Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr), Freaks and Geeks. Has there ever been a geekier scene on TV than the one where Bill sits and watches stand-up comics on TV while eating macaroni and cheese in the most disgusting way possible? I KNEW that guy in high school. My drafting class was full of them. Not to mention the band. The first time I saw that scene I nearly cried.

permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 11:59 AM