TV's Just Not Geeky Anymore...

Article originally on Alternative Spotlight.

Last week Smallville ended. Not big news for the majority of people, but for the fans it was an epic final episode that was an appropriate ending to a series which had taken us on a bit of a roller coaster ride over the course of ten seasons. Yet sadly, with the end of Smallville, comes the end of geeky television…

Ten years ago, we were inundated. The likes of Startrek Voyager and Stargate-SG1 graced our screens. It was the sort of television that made your Mum ask ‘What’s this rubbish?’ Girlfriends didn’t get it (in the unlikely event that you had one) and you noticed Dad’s watching out of the corner of their eye. Being a fan of such programs granted exclusive access to a club of geeks and losers. And it was great.

The reason I bring this up is, and I never thought I’d utter these words, it’s just not the same anymore. Geekiness has become hip. It’s become cool. Smallville was the final season that was for the geeks. They didn’t fear dropping in obscure references to characters from the DC universe. It’s the final standard-bearer for the Buffy era of television.

I hear people out there asking how can television not be geeky with such gems as the current run of Doctor Who and Stargate Universe. Well, the current run of Doctor Who seems to be one of the most popular things on television at the moment, and it’s amazing yes, but it doesn’t isolate the general public with it’s intelligence. In fact it draws them in. Good for the Doctor. The same goes for Stargate Universe. One of the best series I’ve seen in a long time. But it’s been cancelled because the fans thought it was ‘too soap-operay’. Maybe I shouldn’t have put that in quotation marks, but you get the gist. It was about the people, and if it had been marketed properly it would still be running and pleasing us all. But it’s not geeky. My Dad liked it.

So what can we do? It seems geeky has become cool, but in doing so it has lost part of what made it geeky in the first place. Every comic book is being made into a film, series about super-powers are being made left right and centre and there seems to be a new influx of television that’s dealing with alien invasions. I ask the geeks of the world, the Warhammer collectors and the Startrek fanboys, ‘What do we have left that’s just ours?’ Nothing is the answer. I’m going to take up stamp collecting.