Beauty and the Geek kicks off its fourth season with a two-hour premiere tomorrow night starting at 8pm.  The reality series matches up beauties who want for nothing in the looks department with geeks who are brilliant but need help with social skills, each helping the other become more well-rounded people as they all compete for a cash prize.  Mike Richards, the host of Beauty and the Geek, spoke to BuddyTV about the couple to look out for, the new twist in store for this season and whether he was a beauty or a geek when he was in high school.

Hi, this is Debbie from BuddyTV, and I'm talking with Mike Richards, the host of the CW reality series Beauty and the Geek. Hi, Mike.

Ah! Oh sorry, I thought there was going to be thunderous applause.

So for those of our readers who might be new to the show, can you just tell us a little bit about it?

I can. I mean we've got it down to a pretty quick pitch, which is we take ten geeks and ten beauties, put them in a house together. We team them up, we are not a dating show, so one guy geek goes with one female geek. And the goal of the show is to have each side kind of learn from each other.

So geeky guys learn things from beautiful girls that they would not otherwise know, and then the geeky guys teach the beautiful girls things that they wouldn't know, like math and science and all that. It is a social experiment.

Excellent. And how did you get the job as host? Because you didn't start with the first season.

I did not. I had hosted a show called High School Reunion for the WB. And when they were out looking for a new host, my name came up, and very soon after that I was on set, hosting Beauty and the Geek. But it was fun, because I was already a fan of the show before, from the first season.

So I was already kind of on board. And when they were like, “Well, I don't know if you remember how it went last season, but we did this.” I was like, “Oh yeah, that was when so-and-so got eliminated, and Richard did this,” so I was already a fan.

Yeah, it's a good show. What did you like about it, why do you think the show's been successful?

I think what I liked about it is, one of the reasons that it has been successful, and that is that you are able to relate in some way to either the beauties and the geeks. They're pretty extreme, especially the geeks, they are very geeky guys. And the girls are beautiful, and have used their looks to their advantage their whole lives.

I think we can all relate to that really geeky guy in high school, whether you were him or you were friends with him, or whether the really pretty girls were mean to you. So I think there's that very relatable feeling of the show. I also think it's one of the funniest shows on TV.

It's not staged to be funny, the people that are in it are put in difficult situations where they react in a very organic and real way. I think that people like that, it's funny, it's not mean. There's heart to it, and some of the reality shows, you feel like you kind of need a bath afterwards.
Which is good, I love those kinds of shows too. But this is one that you can kind of watch and you can be in your college dorm watching it, or you can be watching it with your kids and your grandparents.

Yeah, I definitely agree that you can relate to both sides. What about you, which side do you relate more to?

It's always gonna be easier for me to relate to the geeky guys. I mean I was that kid in high school who was not, I mean, I was never shy for sure. But I had glasses and I was quite a bit shorter than everyone, and I was definitely not a jock, and I was definitely not in the cool crowd.

So I'm not as smart as the geeks that we have on our show, and they're all genius level IQ for the most part, so at that part I don't relate to. But I relate to not being comfortable around girls at that age, and struggling just socially, where you fit in and wanting to be yourself, but also wanting to go out on dates occasionally.

The girls are tougher for me to relate to, just because I never had that kind of walk into a room and everybody kind of gets quiet, and you kind of get away with whatever you want.

Right. So for this season, I hear that there's gonna be a twist. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I sure can. There is a switch this year, it's kind of the thing that if you're a fan of the show, you've thought about it before and you weren't sure how it was gonna work. What we've done is taken one team, and the beauty is a male and the geek is female, and the other nine teams are the same standard format.

And it provided the social experiment, it kind of made the experiment evolve and made it more interesting, and I think helped the people in the cast evolve as well. Because this guy that we had on, the male beauty is one of the funniest characters I've seen in reality. Name is Sam, he uses five different kinds of tanning lotions, just to kind of give you an idea of where he stands.

But he was very cool to the guys, and encouraged them and said, “Hey, this is how you act around girls.” I think that was kind of an unexpected surprise. And the other side, the female geek who is, she's so smart and she's so sweet.

But she was one of those people that didn't care about her appearance or anything like that, and the beauties really helped her come out of her shell and become more attractive to guys. And in the process, a lot of the geeks in the house really developed strong feelings for her.

Yeah. The thing that I notice about this show compared to other reality shows, you mentioned this earlier, is that everyone seems really nice and they genuinely want the other people to succeed as well. And so I mean, you're supposed to be objective as a host, but do you ever have any favorites that you wanna root for?

Yes, I am objective. And the way that this whole series is set up, there's no way that I can really influence it one way or another. But I am objective, and I cheer for everyone, but at the same time there's always gonna be people that I cheer for. It's usually the people that have the farthest to go.

The people that walk in, the geek who walks in and is pretty comfortable around women, and after the first week is comfortable. Giving them back rubs and asking them out and trying to kiss them, all that. That doesn't seem like someone who needs as much work as someone who's still struggling, so I always cheer and I think everybody does.

You kind of cheer for the underdog. You know in the first season that I did, which was season 2, you cheered for Josh, who was really, he needed a lot of help. He needed a lot of work, and he ended up winning because he came the furthest, and that's what the show's about. And last season which was season 3, we kind of had a similar thing in that Scooter was one of the top three guys that came in with the least amount of game, with the least amount of confidence in himself.

And he ended up growing the furthest, and I ran into Scooter about six months after the show, and he had continued his growth. That's kind of what the show is all about. And to your point about everyone was so nice last year, I thought that there was more competitiveness, more concentration on the game rather than the social experiment with a prize at the end.

This year you will feel so good watching the people, because they literally cheer for each other. They literally help each other through the challenges, even though they're on competing teams. Their feeling is that the only way for them all to improve is to improve together.

Is there anyone this year who we should keep an eye out for?

I would keep an eye out for not the winner, but as far as my favorite one, my favorite characters. There's a team that is Joshua and Shay, and they team up and they are the people who in my mind have the farthest to go. And there is a sweetness to them, Joshua is so shy at first and so unsure of himself, and he really, really becomes a better person.

Shay is a huge part of his growth, and he also helps her grow, so they're the team that you'll kind of see me smiling at them. And boy they did great for however long they've stayed in the game, which I can't tell you.

Cool, I'll look forward to that. And Ashton Kutcher is one of the executive producers of the show, how involved is he?

He's involved. I mean, he knows that this is an important show for him, he has a very… a business is flourishing in that he has a television production company Katalyst that has a lot of different shows going on. I mean, you all know about Punk'd and Beauty and the Geek, that they have a number of things in the pilot phase, things that are coming out.

They're a very busy, very successful company, but he still is very focused on this show. He is someone who is a part of the casting process, he is not on camera, but he is in the room during when the producers are picking out who's gonna be on the show. He is there, it is very much his sensibility to the show which is, it's very elaborate and very smart.

And then not mean, and that's kind of how he's built his brand. I mean that's what Punk'd is, Punk'd is a very funny show that is very elaborate, but at the same time it's never really mean. It never really puts someone in a bad situation where they would act inappropriately.

And that's kind of what he brings to the show, but he is very involved with what the challenges are gonna be, and who the cast is gonna be. And that's kind of the heart of the show.


-Interview conducted by Debbie Chang
(Image courtesy of The CW)