TV Genius - Television Tropes & Idioms

That's why I hate intellectuals! They're all so dumb!

—Mary, from the play Mary, Mary

An unintelligent person's idea of how an intelligent person acts. This is especially obvious when the lead character is a "normal" person, inasmuch as being clever but not actually very smart.

In TV land, it seems, intelligence isn't just a matter of being able to learn quicker, reason better, and understand more easily. It carries along a whole host of strange behaviors, taped together as part of a package deal. While intellectuals often do have interest in obscure topics, a TV Genius literally has no idea how to act in public, or at least have the ability to stay quiet, and often carry him/herself with a sort of overbearing arrogance. Sometimes, he will also be The Spock.

A TV Genius will never use a short word when a long one will do, and is inexplicably amazed that other people have different interests than themselves. Their only pastimes will be reading thick tomes and playing chess.

Incidentally, real people who act like this are considered to be possessed of a mildly autistic syndrome

If a character becomes smarter, for instance through a Transformation Ray, they'll instantly acquire all sorts of knowledge that they never actually learned at any point. This could easily be explained by saying that he'd learned it all before at some point, but not remembered or understood it until now, but it never is. Someone who becomes suddenly smarter may also suddenly acquire a lab coat, Nerd Glasses, and start speaking like Mr. Spock, though this is usually limited to the more comedic examples.

There's also a chance that this character will be used in An Aesop, where one of the main characters wishes s/he had this person's intelligence, only to learn of their inner unhappiness.

The Teen Genius, Mad Scientist, and The Urkel all contain aspects of this. This trope often contains an impossibly or immeasurably high IQ

See also: Science Is Bad, Dumb Is Good, Straw Vulcan. When done intentionally (and everyone in the story realizes too that the person is not a real genius) it is Know Nothing Know It All.

Examples

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Anime and Manga

Sort of used by L in Death Note, and also by Near, but averted rather heavily with Light and possibly also with Mello.
- Death Note is a complete aversion, as almost all of the characters are intelligent in different ways. Most blatantly demonstrated by Near and Mello, the former being a careful analyst and the latter being an impulsive but brilliant schemer.
  - Both L and Near would be diagnosed with mild Asperger's if they were real, but I would say Light and Mello are more subversions since Genius is a stated part of their characters, but they don't act like tv geniuses.
  - Mild?! Mello could be said to have it mild. L and Near are in at the deep end though. Their tics and obsessions are pushed to quite serious extremes... In any case though, none of them effectively match this trope. L plays tennis, Near plays with toys, Mello hangs with gangsters.
Suzumiya Haruhi gives us Haruhi, Yuki and Koizumi, all of whom are highly intelligent individuals with highly noticeable eccentricities. The trope is averted, however, with Kyon, who despite peppering his narrative with obscure references to literature, mythology and history, is portrayed as a generally well-adjusted individual who is often annoyed by his friends' quirks.
- While he does have an extensive knowledge of such things, Kyon's grades are repeatedly shown to be poor, perhaps making him a better candidate for Book Dumb. Haruhi has to tutor him more than once in the novels.
Kotomi Ichinose from Clannad lacks all but the most basic of social skills while being a Teen Genius. Of course, she has a Freudian Excuse because the last thing she told her parents before they died in a plane crash was that she hated them and Tomoya didn't show up for her birthday party. As a result, she shunned society and studied, and studied, and studied, and studied, and, well, you get the idea.
Nina Einstein. Oh God, Nina Einstein. Genius-level intellect and machine building skills, crippling insecurity, ginormous fear of Japanese and so on. And after her crush Euphemia died... It Got Worse.
- And what about Lloyd? He's not nicknamed "Lloyd Aspie" for anything.

Comic Books

Film

Literature

Live Action TV

Subverted hard by Seamus Zelazny Harper in Andromeda. He is always hyping his own status as a genius and it is borne out by his ability to keep the titular ship running with barely a skeleton crew; however, otherwise he is likely to be surfing, drinking rotgut, or planning horrific vengeance upon his enemies.
This is apparently the entire premise of CBS's sitcom The Big Bang Theory.
- The fans have so many theories on the state of Sheldon's mind. You can pick any combination out of Asperger's Syndrome (or several other autism spectrum disorders,) Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, Narcisstic Personality Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder (in an unusual but not unheard of form,) Histrionic Personality Disorder, acquired brain injury to the frontal lobe...
- The other three are also extremely intelligent, but no where near as TV Genius as Sheldon.
  - To reiterate, in a show where nearly three of the five main characters have at least one doctorate (Penny has a high school diploma, while Howard only has a masters) and most of the recurring characters are university professors or otherwise in highly technical fields, Sheldon is universally regarded as incomprehensibly bizarre.
The main protagonist of the Fox TV series Bones started as a textbook example of this trope, but in later scenes showed a more realistic backstory, a love of Foreigner and Cindy Lauper, and slowly growing appreciation for her Book Dumb partner Booth's intuitive people skills. Her status is mostly justified by her childhood trauma, reliance on anthropological explanations over psychology and normal social skills, and aversion to any kind of imprecision.
- Her primary assistant for the first 3 season, Zack Addy, is an even better example, to the point where Word Of God is that he does suffer from Asperger's, but is undiagnosed.
- The show subverts this somewhat with the other Smart Guy of the show, Jack Hodgins. He's likable enough to hang out and have a beer with ex-military guys, and dates a number of women, including co-worker and The Chick Angela.
Buffy's Willow is something of a subversion. Despite having a formidable IQ and computer hacking skills, her vocabulary never seemed to go above that of a twelve year old. Her boyfriend Oz was just as brilliant but deliberately flunked a year and was in all other things a typical indie guitarist.
Almost everyone on Frasier.
Largely averted by The IT Crowd especially from series 2 onwards. Moss, despite his strange appearance and apparent genius-level intelligence, is reasonably socially capable and most of the embarrassing situations he finds himself in/causes are down to misunderstandings rather than ineptitude, while Roy seems perfectly normal most of the time.
- Moss does have a lot of social ineptitude, but this is addressed directly, meaning that the show averts this by very rarely having people consider him to be capable of knowing anything except book smarts.
Subverted in Malcolm in the Middle. The title character has a genius IQ, but deliberately the only way the writers ever actually showed this was in spending days coming up with complex solutions to the problems of an episode, then portraying Malcolm as coming up with the same ideas in seconds.
- Also, Malcolm is really irritated by his classmates who exhibit stereotypical nerdish behaviour.
- Malcolm is one of the more realistic portrayals of a genius, in that he's a normal kid for the most part, who happens to be gifted and still has to work his ass off to get good grades.
  - Nonsense. Given the intellectual ability Malcolm shows he shouldn't have to work very hard to get good grades, even in honors courses, unless he went to a really hard prep school or was in college (and even then it would have to be a hard degree, not liberal arts). I speak as someone who got 5s on AP tests without studying, and Malcolm's whole character concept is that he should be smarter than me. I agree he is a more realistic portrayal, since most of the really intelligent people I know don't act like a TV Genius.
  - Good grades and intelligence don't necessarily have a direct correlation to one another. Someone who is incredibly smart could easily find difficulty in getting good grades, especially if the student and teacher don't always see eye-to-eye, which is the case with Malcolm in this show and also when Malcolm fills out a test to keep Reese from flunking.
The Blue Ranger of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He is very upset from getting a "B", yet he received the grade because he didn't have even an elementary school level knowledge of insects.
- His name is Billy Cranston. And he was also afraid of fish.
- There's also Dr. K of Power Rangers RPM, but she's justified as essentially being Raised By Science! and being very screwed up as a result.
In the 4th episode of Star Trek The Next Generation called "The Nth Degree", Lieutenant Barclay is struck by a Cytherian probe and becomes a TV Genius.
Subverted in The West Wing, particularly with the character of President Jed Bartlet; a Nobel Prize-winning economist, veritable mental warehouse of obscure trivia and unashamed intellectual, Bartlet was also a genuinely caring, personable and likeable man with a great deal of charm. He was, after all, able to get himself elected twice to the office of President of the United States, which requires some people skills.
- Also subverted generally throughout the series, a key theme of which was that intelligence and intellectualism were nothing to be afraid of or ashamed of, and that treating the American people as thinking adults would reward everyone.
- A different reading has this simply being a way for the writers to put their viewpoints into the mouths of all the really smart guys.
For a show where science might as well be magic, Eureka is amazing in that it flat out ignores this trope with its scientists. Most of the cast have better than genius IQs and run the gamut from Fargo, who's just like this, all the way to Stark, a charismatic family man.
Largely deconstructed and averted in Fringe with the Bishops. Walter Bishop can come off this way, but he's actually a severely damaged man from being wrongly committed to a mental institution for 17 years, not (entirely) from his genius. Peter Bishop, Walter's son (sort of), is about as intelligent and inventive as his father, but is much more socially-adept.

Newspaper Comics

Western Animation

In an episode of the Disney/Aladdin cartoon series, Aladdin's head was separated from his body. The head, containing the brain, suddenly became a TV Genius and was able to spout scientific knowledge that no one in this period (barring perhaps genies) should have access to, such as how nerves work. Aladdin's headless body, containing his good heart, became an embodiment of Dumb Is Good, whereas the head turned into an Anvilicious Straw Vulcan.
Ben 10 has a morph, Grey Matter, that greatly increases his intelligence. As Grey Matter, Ben knows a lot of information that he couldn't possibly know, speaks in unnecessarily long words (unlike his usual, typical ten-year-old method of speech), and appears to lose common sense and the ability to talk to normal people (when asked "where are you?" he begins to give information that could find his geographical position, such where he is in reference to a mountain, until prompted for the name of a street).
- Even more of a Wall Banger in that Ben is of at least average intelligence and rather impulsive, and Grey Matter is the only form that significantly alters his personality. So when he's a human, he's somewhat intelligent and appropriately resourceful and as Grey Matter he lacks even more common sense than normal, but can fix just about anything. What?
  - Grey Matter is the only alien that alters his brain.
  - This gets driven home in an episode where Ben was stuck in Grey Matter form, and when requesting the use of various alien gadgets that regular Ben would never know of, Grey Matter specifically states that HE was the one speaking about the solution to the problem, not Ben.
- ...kid Ben had common sense?
The titular character of Dexters Laboratory: he's a world renowned genius capable of building time machines, giant robots and create all sort of genetically modified creatures, yet thinks "girl" is some kind of tribe, doesn't know what dirt is, and one time thought he was going to die due to having gas.
- Most if not all of the particularly stupid examples of that come from the episodes after the terrible redesign.
  - The ones mentioned above were definitely pre-redesign.
Averted in an episode of Doug. Skeeter, who'd always been the goofy sidekick type, takes an IQ test and scores incredibly high. Over the course of the episode, he is studied by scientists and gets into college (from the elementary-school setting of the series). This revelation goes largely ignored in most later Nickelodeon episodes, the Disney series has Skeeter's genius IQ play a role in a few other plots. However, at no point in either series does his personality change from The Ditz.
Family Guy does this with Lauren Conrad.
An episode of Kim Possible featured a beam capable of drastically increasing one's intelligence, which in this case was used on Rufus, a naked mole rat, propelling his intelligence to superhuman levels. Rufus suddenly gained enormous amounts of incredibly complicated knowledge and inventing skills, even putting the show's resident Teen Genius Wade to shame. There was something about copying the brainwaves of the world's most brilliant minds as well, which just further confuses the matter.
Brainiac 5 from the ~~new~~ canceled Legion Of Super Heroes animated series seems to use this persona to hide his true emotions. Which seem to involve a lot of Superman and wanting to become human.
The Simpsons:
- Martin Prince reveled in this trope to such a degree that, when he briefly stands up to the bullies who had abused him for 20-odd years for a brief scene in The Movie, this editor's theater erupted in applause.
- Another Simpsons episode had Homer gaining a genius-level IQ eventually revealed to be 105, an increase of 50 points after the removal of a crayon lodged in his brain. It also affected his already poor social skills, at least the ones that were actually endearing.
Brainy Smurf. Hands down.
Patrick of Spongebob Squarepants was once made smart for an episode, but he voluntarily returned to stupidity after he realized he was turning into an Insufferable Genius and growing apart from Spongebob.
In Transformers Generation 1, Grimlock gets an IQ boost after chewing into a supercomputer. Not only does it boost his intellect, it makes his speech far more intelligible to the point of snooty. He becomes the go-to guy for the Autobots' problems, but the rest of the Dinobots don't think he's fun anymore.
The Superhero Squad Show episode "Hulk Talk Smack" featured the Hulk being smartinized by the show's Mac Guffin. In addition to his skin turning grey (a Continuity Nod to the comics) he starts dressing well and speaking eloquently. He also becomes an insufferable jerk and can't seem to hold his own in a fight anymore.