Is Syfy’s New Quiz Show ‘Geeks Who Drink’ Geekier or Drinkier?

Last night, Syfy premiered the nerd-culture quiz show Geeks Who Drink, hosted by one-time nerd-culture avatar Zachary Levi (guys, remember Chuck? No? There were Subway sandwiches…). The show pits a team of (suspiciously camera-friendly) geeks against each other, each paired with a celebrity captain. This week, the captains were Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights) and Eric Christian Olsen (NCIS: Los Angeles). This show joins the likes of NBC’s Hollywood Game Night and Spike’s Lip Sync Battle, where celebrities lower themselves to compete with/for the commoners by performing such things as charades, lip-syncs, and jello-shot bucket tosses (more on that it a second).

With a title like Geeks Who Drink, there are a few expectations being set up from the outset. We all know how seriously geeks take the idea of fake-geeks. You’d damn well better be sufficiently geeky, especially on a network like Syfy. And if you’re going to promise drinking, know that we live in a universe with Watch What Happens Live and the Golden Globe Awards, so don’t promise boozing unless you’re prepared to deliver.

Ultimately, the question is: is Geeks Who Drink geekier or drinkier? Let’s get to measuring:

GEEKY

The biggest feather in Geeky’s cap is the questions: they are incredibly geeky and difficult. If your main point of entry into the superhero genre is the Marvel movies, that’s not nearly enough to keep up with these questions. That said, one piece of advice for the show going forward: slow the heck down! Most TV quiz shows move too slowly, packing themselves with filler and useless getting-to-know-you chit-chat. Geeks Who Drink is the rare quiz show that actually moves too fast, without much time for the questions to sink in (or, more importantly, for the home audience to play along). Every round plays like a lightning round. Lightning rounds should be special!

The match-a-movie-poster-to-its-featured-song round is hugely entertaining (see above), and not as hard as the other, geekier questions — but, again, goes a bit too fast to really play along at home. People like to play along at home! They’re not tuning in just to watch Eric Christian Olsen make cracks about Zachary Levi’s underpants.

DRINKY

Host Zachary Levi, who reveals himself to be pretty smarmy and obnoxious, all things considered. He’s definitely the guy at the bar who sucks up everyone’s attention by being louder than everybody else.

For an ostensibly geeky show, the final round is the frattiest thing on TV, with teams tossing cubes of Jell-O shots into a bucket.

Scott Porter laughs so hard he snorts his drink through his nose, which, if he’s really drinking whiskey, really might have knocked him on his ass, drunkenness-wise.

Clearly someone in production was drunk if they thought the chess piece in this quad was a queen …

…unless we’re also looking at Rook Amidala, the Alien Rook, and rook bee Regina George. GET IT TOGETHER, Geeks Who Drink.

VERDICT

As drinky as the show can get, the high geek quotient of the questions tip the balance towards geeky. If the show can tweak itself to be a bit more friendly to those of us who want to play along at home, it might be a pretty good entry in the Celebrity Quiz Show genre.

Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.

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