I had a problem with the idea of calling the show King of the Nerds because of the gender focus. It confused people. What would happen, people wanted to know, if a woman won? Would she be Queen of the Nerds? Would the title of the show be dependent upon who won every season?
When Robert and I first appeared at the Television Critics Association event to introduce the show, I made a point of noting that there have been historical cases where women ruled as kings, not queens, including the Egyptian pharaohs Merneith and Khentkawes. This may have been a stretch, but no one else connected with the show seemed concerned about it so I doggedly stuck to my explanation.
As co-executive producers in that first season, Robert and I were generally kept on the sidelines. Many actors get executive producer titles for shows without ever having anything to do with the creation, casting or running of the show, and our producing partners took it for granted that we would be happier simply collecting our fee and doing our “real” job, hosting the show as heightened versions of ourselves, Curtis and Bobby. Robert was happy with that but by the time pre-production for the second season rolled around, I had forced myself into the entire process, attending challenge meetings, budget meetings and casting sessions. When the show was in production I would be one of the first producers in the monitoring room in the morning, and one of the last to leave at night. To me the show had become far more than just a handy source of additional income.
By the end of the first season, despite a disastrous climax in which the final Nerd-Off was decided by what could only be described as a popularity contest, I was hooked. It wasn’t that I was interested in the idea of producing for a living. If anything, I realized I didn’t really have the ice water in my veins that is necessary to be a successful producer. It was King of the Nerds, and more importantly, the individual cast members that made up those three magic seasons, that had hooked me.
Here I was—a successful actor—approaching sixty, married to Elaine Aronson, the love of my life and my best friend; I was the father of Lily, an accomplished, beautiful, brilliant daughter. At a time when my personal life couldn’t have been more happy and stable, I found myself falling helplessly in love again.
With a bunch of damned nerds.
* * *
There were eleven of them in the first two seasons, and twelve in the third: gamers, mathematicians, computer geeks, scientists, comic book nerds, cosplayers, rocket scientists, puppeteers, writers, vloggers. They swore by Star Trek or Star Wars, by DC or Marvel, by Dr. Who or Harry Potter. They played traditional board games, console games, tabletop games, computer games, video games. They LARPed, sang, played musical instruments, spoke HTML/CSS. Their casual conversations, sometimes caught on camera, sometimes not, were a baffling delight. They communicated on an elevated level, regardless of the subject, that appeared to be beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. They understood one another, which didn’t mean they always got along. They flirted, disputed, argued and laughed. They ate shitty pizza till it was coming out of their ears and drank themselves into stupors. They plotted and schemed and manipulated, celebrated and debated. A couple of them may have hated either other nerds or us for putting them through constant challenges and inevitable failures.
Two of the three kings were women. I loved that.
But there were problems during that first season, one of them involving Robert.
King of the Nerds was an unscripted show, but there were parts of it, particularly when we were required to lay out parameters of the game, where we had to be word perfect. On the first day of filming, Tuesday, July 15, 2012, we stepped out to address the nerds for the first time and Bobby froze. The lines were just gone. Fortunately, we were hooked up to the production room through earbuds, a necessity for this kind of show in case the show runners wanted us to repeat a line or give direction in our questions. Now, this system was called into service to feed Bobby his lines.
It was a traumatic start for everyone, especially Bobby. At the time, he didn’t really give any kind of explanation for his situation. Only that he was finding it hard when he didn’t have a script to fall back on, though improvising wasn’t that difficult when we were supposed to do that: it was the scripted material he was having problems with. Admittedly, the script changed constantly during the course of the day, sometimes with new pages handed to us at the last possible moment. My Moonlighting schooling had prepared me for this kind of eventuality, but it was clearly hard on Bobby. Separately, our show runners would approach me during the course of the day, eyes filled with concern. “Is he always like this?” they would say. “What can we do to help?” The truth was, I had no answers for them. I tried to remain calm, feeling that that was the best approach with him at this point. I privately asked Edie, his Swiss-born wife, if she knew what the problem was.
“What problem?” she asked, with a stony expression. “Everything’s fine.”
Everything was not fine and it didn’t improve much that season. His wooden, tentative delivery was cause for concern and had to be tweaked constantly in post-production. I was beginning to think this could cost Bobby his on-camera job and, as we were a team, maybe mine, too. Edie seemed to make a point of being at his side at all times and virtually every question or comment directed to him had to go through her. When I could get Robert alone I would try to talk with him about what was troubling him but there was no getting through, no communication. By midway through that first season, I had started writing, unofficially, some of the scripted material on the show, particularly my farewell speeches to each of the nerds. One of the producers, Rebecca Hertz, and I, along with Armstrong and Ringbakk, started subtly reworking how Robert and I “presented.” Bobby played the quiet, reserved nerd and I became the loud, voluble, talkative one, which was pretty much what we were like anyway. We got through that first season, but it seemed that from now on, the weight of the hosting duties would be on me. If we got a second season at all.
In a conversation for this book in 2016, Robert was candid about his struggles in the first season of King of the Nerds.
“For me, the first season was enormously uncomfortable,” he said. “They kept changing the script at the last second and I found that really annoying. I just couldn’t find my comfort level in that environment. I think it was what I was going through personally at the time—not professionally, because there was nothing wrong with the production. They were perfectly capable people, doing everything they were supposed to do. So it was my inability to leave my problems at home.
“By the second season, having done it once, it was just a little less terrifying.”
Indeed, by the second season, Robert had leveled out to the point that Charles Wachter and Antony Carbone, who were coming more to the fore as show runners, were giving him more to do. To everyone’s relief, on-camera Bobby was recognizably the Bobby of old.
Off-camera, Robert had always had a thing for speed. He was a car nut, a gear head, a speed freak. He loved cars, powerful cars, and he loved driving them fast.
He also was a passionate race car driver and had only quit—at Edie’s insistence—when he was involved in a serious crash on the speedway. But, no matter how reckless he was, Bobby always seemed to be able cheat death and disgrace.
* * *
The morning of the third-season finale of King of the Nerds, I was up early and preparing to head to Las Vegas for a Supernatural convention when I got an email from Kayla LaFrance, the winner of the second season of KOTN and a friend. She wanted to know if I’d heard anything about Bobby having been in a car crash, and provided a link to the TMZ site that showed Bobby’s car crumpled at the side of a highway in Colorado.
I started by trying to contact Bobby by every means at my disposal. I called his phone, Edie’s phone, his two younger children’s phones. I tried texting, DM, emailing. I tried the hospital that had been named in the TMZ article, but at that point it had been ten days since the accident and if Bobby was still in the hospital, the hospital had figured out ho
w to deny it. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out whether or not I should board the plane to go to Vegas for the Supernatural convention, or cancel at the last minute. I decided finally to go, thinking if Bobby were still in Colorado, it would be as easy for me to get to him from there as from L.A. My agent had already been contacted by the press wanting me to comment, which I didn’t do. This had all the ingredients of a classic Hollywood Dynasty Tragedy in the making: Robert’s older brother, David, had died just a few years earlier, found hanging in a hotel room in Thailand. The details surrounding David’s death were still a matter of dispute—suicide, sexual auto-asphyxiation gone wrong or murder, with Bobby believing the last—but clearly the press was going to be all over this.
But as I boarded my plane at Burbank airport, I got a call from 5×5. Both Rick and Craig were on the phone. At 5×5, they were juggling calls, not just from TMZ and other organs, but from TBS as well.
“We’ve heard from TMZ again,” Craig told me. “They’re now saying that according to the information they have, Bobby’s in a coma, and if they don’t get some comment from us, they’re going to go with that story. They’re kind of panicking in Atlanta. They’ve seen the picture of his car and they’re starting to get cold feet. They say they don’t want to air the finale if … you know, the worst has happened.”
“We have to be careful, though,” said Rick. “This could be just a ploy to get an official statement outta somebody. If they ask to comment on the accident and we stonewall, they come back saying he’s in a coma, which makes us say, ‘No, it’s just a bad accident!’ That’s how they get their quote.”
TBS wasn’t interested in discussing the finer points of tabloid strategies. They didn’t want to run the risk of running the KOTN finale if one of its stars had just died in a car crash. They wanted to pull the episode.
All I could think of was Bobby’s children. Ever, the little girl I’d met all those years ago in Tucson, was a grown woman now and a gifted actress herself. But there were Marika and Ian, Bobby’s children with Edie. And Edie had been in the car as well. What was her condition?
We finally decided that they should call TBS and suggest that they run the episode but that KOTN would add a card at the end that would acknowledge the accident and send him our love. The network felt that would answer their concerns and the show aired as scheduled.
As King of the Nerds went out on the East Coast, I was on a stage in Las Vegas talking to Supernatural fans. Someone in the audience asked how Bobby was. The lights blurred and my voice faltered as I answered he was fine.
* * *
I was finally texted by Bobby, or someone using his phone, and basically told to “cool it.” Meanwhile, Edie Carradine was talking and texting extensively to anyone who contacted her, as long as his name wasn’t Curtis Armstrong. Our relationship, never close, had deteriorated dramatically during the course of the show, essentially ending in the second season during a furious argument on the telephone, during which she told me that King of the Nerds “was Bobby’s show. You’re only on it because he wants you on it.”
Once it became evident that Robert Carradine hadn’t died in that pile of mangled metal on a Colorado highway, the story faded away. The following year, Robert filed for divorce from Edie.
The fate of King of the Nerds itself dragged out over months. The third season, both from a critical and a ratings perspective, had been the most successful yet. Yet with a new broom at TBS, headed by Kevin Reilly, King of the Nerds was canceled on June 26, 2015. I was in Vancouver, shooting the latest episode of Supernatural. Thanks to Craig and Rick, who gave me a heads up, I was able to break the news of the cancellation on social media. None of us, including the executives at 5×5 Media or Electus, were ever told by TBS that the show was being canceled. Craig and Rick found out through a journalist who had interviewed Kevin Reilly about the future of the network. Reilly told him, only in answer to a direct question, “We won’t be doing any more episodes of King of the Nerds.”
Under his administration, only cheap knock-offs of King of the Nerds, like The World’s Greatest Weatherman (right down to the gender-specific title), would be considered.
A little light winked out inside me when King of the Nerds was canceled, but even when the wound was still fresh I realized that what was really important about the show were the new friends I was fortunate enough to have made on it. Of the thirty-five nerds who appeared on the show, I have remained in touch with all but three and have become close friends with a surprising number of the rest. In addition to Kayla, who had always dreamed of a future in space, and is now employed by the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Genevieve Pearson has become one of my best friends. The smarts, creativity and energy she brought to season one of KOTN weren’t enough for her to win the crown, but they were enough for her to be snapped up by a production company to work for them developing other reality shows: the company was 5×5 Media. Elaine and I have periodic nerd bashes at our home; we put nerds up when they come to town; we’ve been to two nerd weddings (Moogega’s to Derek and Ben’s to Colleen) and one baby shower (Ivan and Cassandra’s). One Christmas, as a surprise gift to me, Xander brought his professional Christmas carol group to give a private performance for my ailing mother. Amanda Liston, in a polyamorous relationship, mother of two boys (with Chad) and triplet girls (with Jeremy) moved to Los Angeles after the show and Elaine and I have become unofficial godparents to the children. The connections span all three seasons and are deeper than I can express.
Happily, Robert completely recovered from the accident and is back at work making one movie after another. Every few months we get together at Musso and Frank Grill in Hollywood for steaks and martinis, rehashing thirty-plus years of memories and talking about our children. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever again play the roles for which we are most famous, but the friendship that came out of Revenge of the Nerds, unlikely as it might have been, endures.
AFTERNERD
One of the advantages of being an American-born nerd of my generation is to have been able to reach this stage in my life and look back and realize how much our lot has changed, most of it unquestionably for the better. It’s easy to say that nerds have it a lot better today than they did in the sixties because, strictly speaking, we didn’t have nerds in the sixties. We had nerdy individuals, or pairs—even small packs, if you were really lucky. In the sixties, the culture as such was still years away. But people found each other in schools or each other’s basements or garages. We existed; we just weren’t a force yet. Wherever any kid kept a bunch of comics in a cardboard box, we were there. Wherever monster kids gathered at some supermarket opening to meet Forrest J. Ackerman, Vampira or Tor Johnson, we were there. We were learning folk songs, watching Buck Rogers serials at the cinema or sci-fi films on TV on Saturday afternoons. We collected dolls and action figures. We cosplayed our favorite fantasy characters or cowboys without even having the word “cosplay” to define what we were doing. Of course, our parents knew what we were doing: we were playing make-believe. My sister and I did that; most people do at some point. It’s the make-believe characters played in childhood that help cement our identity as a person. Sometimes as a people.
Some screamed their heads off at Frank Sinatra concerts; their children did the same for the Beatles. There is a strong argument that the thousands of “silly girls” screaming as one person at the four boys from Liverpool actually found unimagined strength in their voices, in their power and unity, and it was that power, the sheer glorious noise they made, that laid some of the foundation for the second-generation feminist movement in the late sixties and seventies and beyond. In 1977, George Lucas created Star Wars, a thrilling pastiche of a very traditional sort, but in doing so created what could only be described as a nerd cultural watershed. In 2015, J. J. Abrams created a new Star Wars, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which featured two actors, Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, who gave young black and female nerds new heroes they could cosplay. Of course girls had Princess Leia to
emulate from the earlier film. But she was a princess. Rey was a warrior.
All of these hobbies, pastimes or avocations—we call them passions or obsessions, now—were tolerated by others as long as they remained the province of childhood: as long as they were things we grew out of. These days, one of the ways we identify as nerds is by accepting a higher truth—that we don’t have to grow out of these things as we grow older. It may be Nancy Drew or Sherlock Holmes, Batman or Pokémon, The Twilight Zone or the Twilight movies: when we bring them along with us on our path, it only enhances the journey. One of the true signs of maturity is realizing that not gracefully surrendering the things of youth actually make us better grown-ups. If more people embraced their inner nerd, the better off everyone would be.
For everyone who looked on nerds with disapproval or hate, there were thousands who got it. The ones with sympathy and imagination always got it. They, too, were nerds, whether they called themselves nerds or not. Nerds always get it.
As long as there have been nerds, there have been those who hate them, bully them.
In Revenge of the Nerds, it was the jocks, the Alpha Betas, who were the bad guys, and that was easy because, in their red and white football jerseys, they were instantly identifiable, like black-hatted cowboys or brown-shirted fascist thugs from a previous generation. But say what you will about the Alpha Betas, they at least had to actually face their victims. The Internet has given Nerd Culture much—you could even say it created it. But it also gave a powerful tool to those who would like to see us humiliated and scorned and vilified. It gave us a chance to find ourselves at a time when we were wandering in the wilderness with no connection. But it also gave our enemies the platform to attack us and to do it completely anonymously. #Gamergate revealed that the problem with Internet fandom wasn’t that we were spending too much time at it, as our parents feared, but that its truly dark forces were not imaginary. They walked among us.
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