I recently finished watching The Librarians as my show-with-evening-meal show.  It was enjoyable and lighthearted, and managed to capture the bombasticness of The Librarian (who did happen to show up on occasion) into a cast of many, which I wasn’t sure that they would be able to pull off.  I think the thing that bugged me the most though, was the reliance on such harsh smart-person stereotypes.

The show introduces three new geniuses – Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, and Jake Stone.  Each one ends up fitting so tightly into a stereotype that it’s a little uncomfortable.  To delve into each character requires minor characters spoilers, which is precisely what I’m going to go into below – you have been warned.

Cassandra’s stereotype is the extremely smart mathematician without the slightest shred of common sense.   In the first episode, she betrays the librarians to the serpent brotherhood when they promised her that they would use the magic of the library to heal her (after they killed everyone else).  The stereotype of geniuses (especially mathematicians) lacking common sense is probably the most annoying to me – as someone who has known a fair number of very smart people over the years (many of which were mathematicians), this stereotype falls so flat that it’s insulting.

Ezekiel Jones is an odd case, but still an annoying one.  He’s the tech geek of the three, but he’s also a thief and the others struggle most with his moral compass.  On the one hand, the thief with the heart of gold is something of a classic stereotype, and one I know Dean Devlin (the director of both The Librarians and Leverage) can do well.  On the other hand, the tech genius without a moral compass is…  …Overused and annoying.

Jake Stone is probably the one character of the three Librarians that I like the most.  Unfortunately, I feel like his genius is underused, not as well understood by the writers, or just overshadowed by Eve.  As a result, he usually just ends up being the secondary muscle (which makes me think of him as occasionally just playing Eliot Spenser.)

In the end, I can deal with my heroes having flaws – that can certainly make them more interesting.  But when I see those flaws really just fitting the stereotype…  …they end up being uninteresting at best and annoying and hard to watch at worst.

That being said, I do enjoy the show – I just wish I liked the lead characters more.  But, when I stop to think about it, I at least enjoy them more than the lead characters in Big Bang Theory and the IT Crowd.  I guess they could do much much worse, I just wish we had cool geniuses on TV (maybe I’ll blog about that soon).