The Quiz Answer Is … “Beauty and the Geek”

Yesterday’s blog quiz invited you to guess which TV show I’ll soon be appearing on.

The clues were pretty sparse. It was a show “that, if you think about it, fits pretty nicely with Freakonomics. … The show is in prime time and it’s taped, not live.”

And yet just 35 minutes after the blog posting, the tenth commenter, “CakeEating,” wrote: “My guess is Beauty and the Geek. Isn’t that starting soon? And Geek rhymes with Freak, right?”

CakeEating is right. I’ll be appearing in the second hour of the season premiere of Beauty and the Geek, which begins at 8 ET/7CT tonight (Wed., Jan. 3), on the CW network (a union of the old WB and UPN networks).

When I was first asked to do the show, I didn’t even bother replying. I’d never heard of it, and from the title it didn’t sound worthwhile. Then I mentioned it to Levitt, who told me that it’s a really good show and that I’d be an idiot to not do it. He was right — at least about it being a really good show. I watched a few DVD’s of last year’s episodes, and was pretty much transfixed. It’s a reality show produced by Ashton Kutcher, who also made Punk’d, but it is not at all? mean-spirited. If, like me, you’ve never heard of the show, it’s described here as “Pygmalion meets Survivor with Punk’d overtones, and manages to win kudos for cultural insightfulness.” I’m not supposed to say anything about the content of the show, but the L.A. Times already has.

So congratulations to CakeEating, who’ll be getting a signed copy of Freakonomics for the first correct answer. MelloYello9838 will also get a book; he/she was randomly chosen from everyone else who also had the right answer but wasn’t first.