From slick sci-fi to tired nerd clichés, the networks' "geek TV" offerings run the gamut from engaging eye candy to unwatchable dreck this fall. Read these reviews of show pilots, then set your DVR on "geek out." (Networks and pilot airdates listed.)

Chuck (NBC, Sept. 24)

Chuck (Zachary Levi, left) and Morgan (Joshua Gomez) get their geek on in Chuck.

A Geek Squad-like techie for an electronics retailer accidentally downloads the nation's top secrets into his brain. The National Security Agency and CIA suddenly want a piece of this guy and, natch, send their top agents to go undercover as fellow big-box drones. The action sequences work best when they're part of the geek plot rather than a drop-in from some spy drama a few sound stages over. When all cylinders fire – most of the time – the fun is infectious and the hit-making potential is palpable.

WIRED: Pitch-perfect Zachary Levi channels his worker-bee equivalents from The Office and Office Space.

TIRED: Forgets its core audience at times and pushes the action-adventure angle too far, like some network suit never figured out this isn't Alias: The Geek Years.

Rating:

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The Big Bang Theory (CBS, Sept. 24)

Leonard (Johnny Galecki, left) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) struggle through The Big Bang Theory.

The IT Crowd handily demonstrates that the premise of two hard-core (male) geeks plus one lust-worthy (female) babe has all the comedy potential any show could need. (See below.) But the studied humorlessness of The Big Bang Theory is made all the more painful by the fact that a solid cast (including the versatile Johnny Galecki as alpha nerd Leonard) has been assembled to recite 22 minutes of pandering Revenge of the Nerds duds for the camera.

WIRED: The most technically nerd-centric of the crop, with scarcely a minute passing by without at least one reference to physics, computers, sci-fi or undue attention to pointless optimization.

TIRED: Fortunately, it's just a theory.

Rating:

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Journeyman (NBC, Sept. 24)

Journalist Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, left) travels through time in Journeyman.

San Francisco journalist Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, who played Lucius Vorenus in HBO's Rome) becomes unstuck in time, Slaughterhouse Five-style, to visit his one-time fiancée and prevent a murder. Drama, theoretically, ensues. But it's mostly paint-by-numbers stuff, with the added confusion of randomly placed trips down the wormhole.

WIRED: Vasser sports an iPhone, and then it's something else, and then ... is that an iPhone? An accidental documentary, perhaps, of the Apple-NBC divorce.

TIRED: Time-wanderer Vasser seems forever fixed with a gaze that doesn't so much say, "Whoa ... time travel!" as "What page are we on again?"

Rating:

Reaper (The CW, Sept. 25)

The devil (Ray Wise, left) shepherds his slacker prodigy Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison) toward a bright future in Reaper.

Writers Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas hit the mark with this The 40-Year-Old Virgin/Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossbreed. Sam, the demon-killer in this case, lives with his parents and works in a chain hardware store. His parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born, and the poor schlub is stuck recapturing damned souls for the dark lord himself. And he's using, at least in the pilot, a handheld vacuum cleaner. Reaper delivers the best pure comedy of any of this season's geek offerings.

WIRED: Ray Wise is deliciously diabolical as the pinkie-ring-wearing devil.

TIRED: Sidekick Bert "Sock" Wysocki (Tyler Labine) can stop doing his Jack Black impersonation now.

Rating:

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Bionic Woman (NBC, Sept. 26)

Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff, left) and Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan) come face to face in Bionic Woman.

This one had so much promise. Like Battlestar Galactica – which NBC-Universal turned into one of the best TV series of the new millennium – the '70s-era Bionic Woman was a geek diamond in the rough, waiting for the right team of visionaries to rebuild her. Mission partially accomplished. Moments of enjoyable television do pull off a daring escape from this mostly tedious pilot. The show suffers the same problem as CDs coming from major labels these days: When every note in a song (or every beat in a script) is pushed to the hilt, there's no dynamic range, no build-ups or take-downs. In other words, it's boring.

WIRED: Katee "Starbuck" Sackhoff as the original bionic woman turned terminatrix. If more bad-ass robots are needed in Sarah Connor-land, look no further.

TIRED: The viewer, when everything (and therefore nothing) is continually at stake.

Rating:

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Pushing Daisies (ABC, Oct. 3)

Stylized dramedy Pushing Daisies pushes the envelope, the color palette and all the right design-geek buttons.

Attention, design geeks: This is a beautifully crafted (and plotted and acted) pilot. Good for ABC: The network took a chance on a great "outsider" show that actually can't be described as Something meets Something Else. But the premise – a clever contrivance involving a baker who can bring back the dead – may run out of steam before the writers and cast can build up theirs. I hope I'm wrong and this winner becomes the hit it deserves to be.

WIRED: Sets, costumes and props as luscious as strawberry pie.

TIRED: Saturated, hypercolored palette is a bit over the top; designers should get in touch with their inner grayscale.

Rating:

Aliens in America (The CW, Oct. 1)

Justin Tolchuk (Dan Byrd, top) and Pakistani exchange student Raja Musharaff (Adhir Kalyan, right) are this season's freaks and geeks in Aliens in America.

There are charming, touching and spill-your-drink funny moments in this sitcom about a Pakistani exchange student named Raja Musharaff (Adhir Kalyan) who joins the family of a geek high school kid in 2007 in small-town Wisconsin. But these moments are punctuation marks. It's ultimately an unevenly scripted and acted project that could have used a few more rewrites.

WIRED: A workmanlike retread of Freaks and Geeks.

TIRED: Leaves out the best parts of Judd Apatow's original, in which even bad guys were compelling characters.

Rating:

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The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, mid-season)

Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her son, John (Thomas Dekker), look on as Cameron Phillips (Summer Glau) assembles a handful of ass-whup for terminator robots from the future.

Geek-tastic fun awaits with a pilot that knows how to pace itself. Connor revisits the downtrodden mother-son duo of The Terminator franchise, forever on the run from killer androids from the future. Don't come to this series expecting brilliance. It's more like your favorite first-person-shooter game suddenly developed a mind – and story line – of its own.

WIRED: Summer Glau (geek heroine River Tam from the Firefly/Serenity universe) brings her ass-kicking boots back to the network that first showcased 'em five years back.

TIRED: Twitchy terminator Owain Yeoman makes one wish for the days before the original model moved to Sacramento.

Rating:

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The IT Crowd (U.K. DVD release early '08; U.S. adaptation coming mid-season)

Moss (Richard Ayoade) has his hands full in the U.K. version of The IT Crowd.

Produced in 2006 for the U.K.'s Channel 4, this comedy about computer geeks staffing a corporate IT department comes out on DVD in the United States early next year. The producers are seeking an American network to carry this utter geek-out sitcom. NBC, no doubt plugging in the same formula that produced The Office, plans to adapt The IT Crowd for an American audience for a mid-season release. While this is no Office – either American or British – it is a cheeky and wholly enjoyable romp through the lives of office workers whose first question is always, "Are you sure it's plugged in?"

WIRED: Product placement here is Electronic Frontier Foundation stickers.

TIRED: Can somebody please lose the laugh track?

Rating: