In search of geek TV

I don’t remember a period of my childhood in which I was not geeky, so I think it’s safe to assume that I was not inadvertantly made a geek by my choice of reading material, like every goofy book by Erich Von Daniken and Omni magazine, or my TV viewing, like the UFO series Project Blue Book and the pseudoscientific documentaries of In Search Of.... I was drawn to this stuff, even as a little kid, because I was predisposed to being a weirdo, not made a weirdo because my tender eyes were exposed to such stuff at a vulnerable age.

So -- between my predisposition and the further warping my brain took devouring crap about Bigfoot and ancient astronauts and weird shit like that -- there was no way I was gonna miss Sci Fi Channel’s new miniseries The Triangle, which is like someone took some of the weird shit I was into as a kid -- the Bermuda Triangle -- and gave it a serious, grownup spin (but one that still recognizes how silly the idea is). And I bet that’s exactly what did happen, cuz guess who two of the producers are -- Xer geeks Bryan Singer (born 1965) and Dean Devlin (born 1962). Just look at their resumes: Singer has reinvigorated the comic-book movie by treating it as Important Stuff (X-Men, the upcoming Superman Returns), and his The Usual Suspects is an Xer touchstone for its twisty, cynical way of looking at the world; Devlin’s 1994 flick Stargate is clearly Chariots of the Gods with explosions, a movie for which he created the first movie Web site ever. You gotta know that they were listening wide-eared to Leonard Nimoy talking about cattle mutilations and ancient UFO landing strips in Peru as kids, too. (The third producer, Rockne S. O’Bannon, isn’t an Xer but he is a geek, who gave us Alien Nation and Farscape.)

So far, The Triangle is not disappointing like other Sci Fi productions have (take Taken... please). It’s actually fairly spooky and neat-o -- I like the idea of the Bermuda Triangle as some sort of temporal wormhole, and that really old six-year-old little girl is gonna haunt me for quite a while, I think... Can the geek boys sustain this, and make The Triangle a worthy continuation of all the strange stuff that blew our minds as kids? We’ll see...