Nerd alert

Blessed be the nerds, for they shall inherit prime time -- if not the rest of the media.

The fall TV season formally begins on Monday, and right away one of the top trends of the year comes to the fore.

If it's no longer hip to be square (never was, Huey Lewis to the contrary), it's undeniably hot to be not (hot, that is). So if you're not hot, that's cool. You dig?

Plainly put, dweebs and geeks, especially of the nebbishy computer variety, are all over the new fall TV shows.

The reason for the rash in eggheads is simple. The networks know the Internet is the future. All the hit shows of recent years have generated buzz on the Web. So, in an attempt to appeal to the people on the Internet, we get a bunch of shows about stereotypical brainiacs, intellectually brilliant but socially inept, because that's the sort of person who's always "logging on," right?

It's the same sort of thinking that produced all the country corn pone shows of the '60s, and all the shows about young singles in the '90s, because that's where the audience trend is -- and just like those previous fads, it's inevitably destined to produce more bad TV than good. Just look at Monday.

"The Big Bang Theory" joins CBS' vaunted comedy lineup at 7:30 p.m. Monday on WBBM Channel 2, nestled between "How I Met Your Mother" and "Two and a Half Men," which is a pretty comfortable place to be, even for those uncomfortable in social situations. It stars Johnny Galecki, formerly of "Roseanne," and Jim Parsons, who had a nice role in Zach Braff's "Garden State," as Leonard and Sheldon, two brilliant but sheltered physicist roommates.

"I have 212 friends on MySpace," Sheldon boasts.

"And you've never met any of them," Leonard points out.

"That's the beauty of it!" Sheldon insists.

To balance out these nimrods, of course, there has to be a hottie. Enter Kaley Cuoco as Penny, a bubble-headed blond waitress at the Cheesecake Factory, who moves in across the hall -- shorting out the circuits of Sheldon, Leonard and their two even dweebier buddies, Simon Helberg's dickey-sporting Howard and Kunal Nayyar's tongue-tied (and tongue-tying) Koothrappali.

"Big Bang" is co-written and -created by Chuck Lorre, of "Dharma & Greg" and directed by the immortal Jim Burrows, so it's a professional piece of comedy. Galecki and Parsons have a nice interplay, with Parsons particularly coming off as something of a smart Stan Laurel with the stone face of a Buster Keaton.

Yet, amid all the jokes about boorish behavior, the show needs a Dharma-like presence to give it some life. Cuoco's Penny just doesn't hack it. Look for even devoted bloggers to start a campaign to bring back "The New Adventures of Old Christine."

NBC counters at 7 p.m. Monday on WMAQ Channel 5 with "Chuck," which is more of a drama to make it compatible as a lead-in to the acknowledged cyber-cult hit "Heroes" at 8. It stars Zachary Levi in the title role as a technician working for Nerd Herd (read "Geek Squad") at Buy More (read "Best Buy"). When his old Stanford chum Bryce Larkin, now a double-naught spy, sends him a dying e-mail (by mistake), it leads to all U.S. government secrets being downloaded directly into Chuck's brain.

At that point, enter the hottie: Yvonne Strahovski's Sarah, who turns out to be a CIA agent assigned to protect him, along with Adam Baldwin's considerably less sympathetic Maj. John Casey. Among the three of them, they set out to save the world on what figures to be a weekly basis. "Chuck" was created by Josh Schwartz of "The O.C.," and the pilot is directed by McG, the one-name wonder who brought you the movie version of "Charlie's Angels," so it achieves a certain stylish proficiency, even as it makes one think, just maybe, a world where nerds rule might not be worth saving.

NBC sandwiches the other side of "Heroes" at 9 on Channel 5 with "Journeyman," which isn't about nerds at all. In fact, it stars Kevin McKidd as a San Francisco newspaper reporter. (Shazam!) Unfortunately, it concerns the other top trend of the fall, paranormal phenomena, as the show finds him suddenly, uncontrollably buffeted back and forth in time. Handy as that might be when it comes to meeting deadlines, it wreaks havoc with his family life, even as he finds some mysterious karmic purpose to setting things right in the past. Then he stumbles on an old flame doing the Time Warp as well, and things get really twisted.

Yet why him? Why her? What are they doing? And why should we care? The creators of "Journeyman" don't seem interested in answering those questions. They only seem to want to generate some buzz on the Internet, and that makes it sadly representative of too much on TV this fall.