CBS Duops Clear Trifecta’s ‘Geek Meets Girl’

Trifecta Entertainment & Media has cleared Geek Meets Girl, a half-hour reality/relationship strip on eight CBS-owned stations including KCAL Los Angeles, KBCW San Francisco, KTXA Dallas, KSTW Seattle, WKBC Detroit and KMAX Sacramento, Calif.

Based on Beauty and the Geek, a reality series that ran for five seasons on The CW, the syndicated series will pair mismatched people, a geek and a beauty, and send them on two dates, with the geek setting the terms on the first outing, and the beauty on the second. Each episode includes a dramatic makeover of the geek and ends with a moment of truth in which, the company says, “the audience finds out if the match is a natural or a natural disaster.”

Hank Cohen, Trifecta’s co-founder and CEO, says the CBS outlets, as well as more than a dozen other stations that have cleared it, will air it primarily in latenight, although some are slotting it in early fringe or prime access. ‘They see this as a utility show that could work in a number of time periods,” he said.

Cohen expects some stations to pair Geek Meets Girl with CBS Television Distribution’s Excused, a reality dating show in which a group of men compete for a date with one of two women who whittle down the competition as they get to know the men and then find themselves competing for the date with the winning man.

KCAL and Weigel Broadcasting’s WCIU Chicago, for example, have cleared both shows.

Katalyst Media Inc. and Nick Santora, creators of Beauty and the Geek, and Clearwater Entertainment are partnering with Trifecta in producing Geek Meets Girl, which will be Trifecta’s first syndicated strip.

The company has also been developing and promoting a court strip, Last Shot with Judge Gunn, based on a real-life judge who sends drug addicts caught up in the criminal justice system to treatment instead of to jail as long as they agree to her terms.