Brainiacs and bimbos, take your partners

Ashton Kutcher was in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont last Wednesday in his “Punk’d” garb -- trucker hat, gas station attendant shirt over T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. But he was there not to orchestrate pranks on his fellow celebrities but to discuss his latest foray into reality television, the summer rollout “Beauty and the Geek,” which he is executive producing, on the WB. (The network is partly owned by Tribune Co., publisher of The Times.)

Kutcher’s business partner, Jason Goldberg, sat next to him, and as the two talked passionately about the state of reality TV it became clear that for Kutcher this isn’t a mere ego-boosting side trip to his acting career. “I’m constantly afraid that I’m going to fail as an actor,” he said, “so it’s hard for me to stand by and do nothing.”

Kutcher, 27, and Goldberg, 34, founded Katalyst Films five years ago. Since then they’ve become best friends, captured MTV audiences with “Punk’d” and produced several films, including the latest Kutcher/Bernie Mac vehicle, “Guess Who.” With “Beauty and the Geek” they’ve created a makeover competition show that is also a comedy. The concept is simple: Seven brainy but nerdy “I’ve-never-kissed-a-girl” guys and seven dumb, pretty, “how-do-you-spell-calendar” gals pair up to try to win $250,000. Each team faces challenges that require the geek to pass some of his brains on to the beauty, while the beauty helps the geek become socially savvy. The geek learns how to dance; the beauty learns basic geography. The geek learns about fashion; the beauty builds a model rocket.

“We didn’t look at it as a typical reality show,” Goldberg explained. “We looked at it as a social experiment.” The show has all the prerequisites of the reality genre, presented with a wink: The contestants are sequestered in a McMansion on a hill, the host is a bit too earnest and the suspense surrounding who’s eliminated is played out like high-anxiety drama. It plays as parody -- but, its creators stress, the contestants are never the butt of the joke.

“The majority of reality TV is crap. People are making quick money on making fun of people,” Kutcher said. “We set out with the mission that we weren’t going to make fun of people. We were going to make funny.”

While “Punk’d” can reduce its celebrity victims to tears, the target is always someone who, in the end, has lived with public exposure long enough to be lighthearted about the joke. But in 2004, Kutcher and Goldberg learned about the perils of mean-spiritedness when their MTV show “You’ve Got a Friend” -- based on a British show in which contestants take on a new obnoxious best friend who lies, humiliates and embarrasses them -- didn’t catch on. Sure, the contestant won $15,000 for enduring the havoc, but ultimately, Kutcher said, “we were promoting meanness, and we realized the reward should be behind honesty and not behind deceit. After that we decided we didn’t want to do anything like that again.”

So when Nick Santora, a writer-producer of “The Guardian” and “The Sopranos,” came to Katalyst with the idea for “Beauty and the Geek,” they immediately saw the potential to fill a niche in the reality market. “We saw a void,” Kutcher says. “No one was doing reality comedy, and we like making funny.”

“Beauty and the Geek” became one of the first shows bought by David Janollari, who has been the WB’s president of entertainment for a year now. It’s also the first reality show Janollari has been involved with in a career in which he’s produced hit shows including “Six Feet Under,” on which he’s still a producer. “A lot of reality shows are just too serious, and that’s the problem,” Janollari said at the show’s premiere party Wednesday night at the Hollywood restaurant Geisha House (in which Kutcher is an investor). “I knew this show would be emotional, but I also knew people would laugh with it, not at it.”

In a TV landscape that still seems like a desert for comedies, a show like “Beauty and the Geek” may even hold a lesson or two for its scripted cousins, Kutcher said. “There is a way to do scripted TV comedy that would solve the problem, but everyone is afraid to do it,” he said. “The studios are afraid to do the thing that would help, which is go live. It could be a complete debacle -- but that’s what would also make it funny again.”

So far, the signs look good for “Beauty and the Geek”: The initial buzz on the show culminated in rousing laughter during Kutcher’s “upfront” presentation to advertisers in New York earlier this month. And while Kutcher and Goldberg admit that no one knows if a show’s a sure thing until it hits the air, they hope their company philosophy will prove to be a winner.

“We’re in the age group of the advertisers’ biggest target audience. We can create for them because we are them,” Goldberg said. “We’re just a couple of guys who want to have fun.” True to form, he and Kutcher mingled effortlessly with the twentysomething crowd at the premiere party.

Earlier that day at the Chateau, Kutcher the producer was briefly eclipsed by Kutcher the celebrity when he ran into Jake Gyllenhaal and the two began to discuss the complications of hiring a personal assistant. When the conversation turned back to “Beauty and the Geek,” Kutcher asked, “Who doesn’t feel stupid sometimes, or who doesn’t feel socially awkward sometimes?”

He was suggesting that the goal of reality television, Katalyst style, is to tap into universal themes -- to be, in effect, a great democratic force. Perhaps it’s even simpler. As geek contestant Eric, a computer programmer from Grants Pass, Ore., says during one episode, “Everyone’s just people.”