Beauty and the Geek

Beauty and the Geek is a reality television series on The CW. It has been advertised as "The Ultimate Social Experiment" and is produced by Ashton Kutcher, Jason Goldberg and Nick Santora.

The premise of the show consists of a group of "Beauties" (young women who have relied primarily on their looks and are intellectually inept) and a group of "Geeks" (young men who have relied primarily on intellect and are socially inept) who are paired up to compete as couples for a shared $250,000 and other prizes. (For the fourth season, the producers modified the formula to include an extra team consisting of a male "beauty" and a female "geek". For the fifth season, the beauties and geeks competed against each other at first, and teams of one beauty and one geek were not selected until the end of episode three.)

Each beauty lives together in a room with her geek during the course of the competition. There are challenges shown each episode, one testing the beauties on a primarily academic subject, and another that has the geeks competing in a more popular/social realm. The winners of the challenges select a total of two teams to compete against each other in a pure "quiz show" type question and answer session, with the team getting the fewest number of questions correct being eliminated.

By the end of the competition, many of the contestants say that they have learned much about interacting with people from a different social group (and positive lessons about the character of people from that group), positive things about themselves and their own character, and often something about human nature in general.

The theme song, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money)" by the Pet Shop Boys (originally released in 1985), is used also on the British and Belgian-Dutch versions. Commercial promos for the show featured a different theme song, "The Geeks Get the Girls" by American Hi-Fi.

Following the second season, the American version moved to The CW Television Network, the new network formed when both The WB and UPN ceased operations in September 2006. The two-hour season premiere for the third season aired Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. EST on The CW. The fourth season premiered on September 18, making BATG the first series to premiere for the CW for the 2007-08 television season. Beauty and the Geek was renewed for a fifth season, which premiered on March 12, 2008.

The fifth season was decided to be the final one until enough time had passed to make the format seem fresh again or if producers come up with a new twist to the format.

In October 2008, casting began for a sixth season, scheduled to air on MTV, with minor celebrities as the beauties