I interviewed these two guys last year, before the first
season of their show. It was a fun interview so check it
out. I got as much time as I wanted for that one. I only got
10 minutes for this one and it went by FAST!! Too fast
:) It was fun to speak with them again, though. Make sure to
watch their show! Details below about it.
Here is the our interview. I hope you
enjoy it!
If the audio is not streaming well, please right-click on
this link and save it to your computer. It should work
better that way! It's only about 11 minutes long.
1. Congratulations on getting a second season on your
show! That's awesome.
Curtis: Well, we're glad and sort of astonished. We came
up with this idea so long ago now, and the idea was
something that we would actually involve other people in
when it came to developing it. You always go into that kind
of thing with a fear that the initial idea would somehow
disappear, but our production partners, Five x Five and
Electus and TBS, have been so supportive of the show and
have helped us along and have been really great. There have
been very few hiccups along the way in two seasons, and it
makes us pretty happy. When we first brought it in there, we
laid it out, and the ball kept being bandied about, and the
production. In the initial pitch, is it a competition or is
it a game show? Is it a competition, is it a game show? And
one of our executive producers, Rick Ringbakk, just kept
saying, "It's competition. It's competition. It's
competition." And off we went.
2. So what is the difference between a game show and a
competition show?
Curtis: What I meant to say was not game show, but
reality where they ... versus a competition.
3. Now, first season was 8 episodes. How many episodes
in the second season?
Curtis: Still 8. It would be hard to go much more, I
think. As much as we love the procedure, it's hard to do
really more than that.
4. Were you pretty happy with the way the first season
went and the response it got?
Curtis: Very happy. Really overwhelmed. It was successful
beyond our expectations. It really was. Really, Robert and I
are both not really Internet people. I mean, it's not
something that we were familiar with, but as a result of the
first season, we both started doing Twitter and Facebook and
that kind of thing, which we'd never done before. The
response that we got from people, good or bad... you know,
we had some people that didn't like it or said that they're
not real nerds; they're actors, and all this stuff that we
got slammed with. By the same token, the far majority of
people who responded were supportive and loved it and we
were just... I mean, you don't get that kind of passion from
your audience, except on something like this. Especially a
bunch of people who spend most of their time in front of the
computer to begin with. When they actually see somebody like
them...
Robert: They want to know how to get on to Season 2. How
do I get on this show? What do I have to do?
Curtis: Or they have someone that they think should be on
the show, and that actually wound up happening for the
second season where we had so many people saying, "You
should get this person." On the Internet, this is. And
they'd say, "You have to get this person. This person is a
real nerd. This person is the best nerd in the world." Blah,
blah, blah, blah! And so we came up with the idea of doing
the people's nerd competition on the Internet. It started
with three people, voting on the Internet, and the winner
would get a place in our second season. And JWittz (Josh
Wittenkeller), who has a huge following, won, so he became
one of our nerds.
5. Did you go back to Comic-Con to find more nerds and
then did you get a lot of good response there?
Robert: We did a couple of Comic-Cons this year. We went
to San Diego Comic-Con while we were shooting. One of the
plans was to do an episode around Comic-Con, but that didn't
pan out. We wound up having...
Curtis: Yeah, we were going to, but we didn't cast out of
Comic-Con this year, which we did the first year, because by
the second season everybody would know what the show was, so
we didn't have to go that route, but we did go to Comic-Con
and New York Comic-Con, as well. You know, those are our
people.
6. So, you got a nice warm response from everyone at the
Comic-Cons?
Robert: Yeah, this year in New York the room where we did
our panel was oversold, so that was heartwarming.
7. Next year, you're gonna have to go in disguise or
something, you're gonna be so popular.
Robert: I know. Actually, it was great because, not only
were we in New York, we had JWittz with us, but we also had
Genevieve from our first season, because she was hired by
Five x Five Media for the second season to be a challenge
consultant. So, she went from being runner up in first
season to actually now having a job developing television at
Five x Five Media, which we couldn't be more pleased about,
because we love Genevieve.
Curtis: She's a great gal.
8. That's fantastic. It's good that you were able to not
only that somebody won the competition show but changed
their lives, really.
Curtis: Yeah.
Robert: Absolutely.
Curtis: I agree. I think it does have that effect.
Especially for the people who are there for most of the
episodes. It is a life-changing event in some ways, and it
certainly was for Celeste who won. And Genevieve as
runner-up did very well for herself.
9. What have you learned since last year about doing this
show?
Curtis: That we had to figure out a way to end it.
Robert: Yeah, that was an overwhelming complaint,
critique. Also because we had the same crew back, most of
the same crew, there's an esprit de corps on the set
developed in the first season and then really flourished in
the second.
Curtis: Yeah. Yeah. That was true, but because you're
dealing with personalities and individuals, every season is
going to be something new. It's not like a scripted series
where you start the series with an arc, and you write
scripts before you even get the actors in the room, all that
kind of thing obviously. So, from our standpoint, we learn
something new all the time. I think the big one last year
was that we had to come up with a better way to end the
show, as opposed to the so-called popularity contest, which
we were very disappointed in, too. There are other things,
littler things, where we'll go, "Well, we'll have to fix
that next season" or "We'll have to fix this next season."
That happens all the time, because new things pop up.
Robert: The pace is pretty hectic, and we keep the
writers working right up until we shoot.
10. What can fans look forward to with these new
episodes?
Curtis: Well, we've got... some of the challenges this
year... we've got two or three challenges this year which
are holdovers from last year, because they were popular. We
had the cosplay episode last year and the debate. But, of
course, you wind up having entirely different, because
they're different people, different personalities, the
debates and the cosplay become completely different
creatures. All the rest of them are brand new nerd wars and
nerd-offs. They are all of them just spectacular, very
inventive. There's a Quidditch one, which we call Nerdditch,
where we actually have them flying on brooms. We have them
placed inside basically a huge Tron game in another one. We
have a robot dodgeball game. There's a lot of really fun,
inventive stuff.
Robert: We've also got some iconic guest judges this
year. Are we allowed to say who we have?
Curtis: Sure.
Robert: Yeah. We have Billy Dee Williams and Jon Heder,
Mayim Bialik. I mean we've got some really great guest
judges. Plus George Takei came back.
Curtis: And Yaya Han.
11. Curtis, will we see you again on "Supernatural" this
season? That's one of my favorite shows so I enjoyed seeing
you on there.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Thanks.
TBS's
King of the Nerds Returns
as 11 New Competitors Vie for the Ultimate
Nerd Title
King
of the Nerds Season Two Set to
Premiere
Thursday, Jan. 23
The
nerds are back as TBS's hit
competition series King of the
Nerds returns for a second
season with all-new nerd-tastic
challenges and a new pack of contestants. Hosts Robert
Carradine and Curtis Armstrong, who also serve as
executive producers, will once again supervise the
proceedings as 11 competitors from across the
nerd spectrum vie for the ultimate
nerd title. King
of the Nerds will kick off its
second season
Thursday, Jan. 23, at
10 p.m. (ET/PT), only on
TBS.
In
King of the Nerds,
competitors face challenges that test their intellect,
ingenuity, skills and pop-culture prowess. The
nerds live together in "Nerdvana,"
competing first as teams before moving on to individual
challenges. In the end, only one competitor will be named
the quintessential master of all things nerdy, winning the
$100,000 prize.
This
year's King of the
Nerds competitors are looking to
inherit the crown from reigning champion, Celeste
Anderson, a professional gamer from Orillia, Ontario,
who specializes in first-person shooters and speed-cubing.
The show will be bringing back some elements from last
season with all-new twists in addition to more exciting and
nerdy challenges. New challenges include Robot Dodgeball,
Nerdiocart and a Science Fair. They will live in a bigger,
better, nerdier Nerdvana during the competition. This
seasons enhanced finale will also be decided by pure
nerd skill rather than by vote.
The
following are the 11 competitors set to participate in the
ultimate nerd-off:
Brian, 27 Urbana,
Ill. Library science scholar who enjoys German-style board
games and discussing 18th-century European history. At one
time, he had 100 books checked out from the Yale library.
Chris, 27 Waco, Texas
Structural engineer who loves to travel and
aspires to work in the space exploration industry.
Jack, 24 Urbana, Ill.
Bioengineering student and fencing and chess champion who
enjoys watching anime in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and
Japanese.
Josh, 23 Grayslake,
Ill. Game vlogger (with nearly 700,000 subscribers),
nerdcore rapper and world competitor in card games.
Katie, 24 Pittsburgh,
Penn. Roboticist and puppeteer whose work has appeared on
Broadway and who formerly performed in ballet companies.
Kayla, 28 Greenacres,
Wash. An ice hockey player who also holds a masters
degree in space studies and believes she will one day reach
Mars.
Kelsey, 23 Canton,
Ga. Quad-lingual Japanophile who is equally as interested
in playing video game music on the piano as she is keeping
up with fantasy/sci-fi novels and swing dancing.
Mary Kate, 23
Starkville, Miss. Aerospace engineering student and avid
costumer.
Nicole, 28 Milwaukee,
Wisc. Chemist, gamer and former marching band member who
currently competes in a Milwaukee roller derby league.
Xander, 27 Los
Angeles, Calif. Vlogger, graphic designer and LARP
enthusiast who lost 100 pounds by playing a popular dance
video game.
Zachary, 21
Minneapolis, Minn. Fantasy writer and hardcore gamer who
has also memorized more than 300 hours of musical lyrics in
genres ranging from J-pop to rock.
Guest
stars set to appear throughout the second season of
King of the Nerds
include Bill Nye (Bill Nye the Science Guy,
Dancing With the Stars), Mayim Bialik (The Big
Bang Theory), Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite),
Kevin Sorbo (Hercules), Kumail Nanjiani
(Franklin & Bash), a Revenge of the
Nerds reunion and return
appearances by George Takei (Star Trek) and
Yaya Han.
King of the Nerds
is executive-produced by Ben Silverman, Chris
Grant and Jimmy Fox of Electus and
Craig Armstrong, Rick Ringbakk and Charles Wachter
of 5X5 Media, as well as Carradine and Armstrong.
Electus International, the global distribution arm of
Electus, is distributing the series internationally.
Connect
with TBS's King of the
Nerds
Website:
http://www.tbs.com/shows/king-of-the-nerds
Facebook:
http://facebook.com/KingOfTheNerdsTBS
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/KingofNerdsTBS
| #KingOfTheNerds
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