NERD HERD NEW CROP OF TV SHOWS FOCUS ON THE GEEKIER SIDE OF LIFE.

Byline: STORIES BY DAVID KRONKE

>TV CRITIC

After falling in love this summer with "Superbad's" ubernerds Seth, Evan and McLovin, TV viewers will have plenty of opportunity this fall to embrace their inner geek.

Josh Schwartz, executive producer of "Chuck," about a slacker who becomes an unlikely hero, suggests the proliferation of gawky protagonists should not come as a surprise to anyone who has ever met a TV writer.

"As a writer, you want to write what you know," he says, drolly adding, "and certainly, as I can attest, many more writers resemble Chuck than Jack Bauer. Just saying."

Moses Port, executive producer of "Aliens in America," about a gawky teen who finds hope for surviving his high-school days from an unlikely source, concurs.

"Everybody kind of feels like an outsider," Port says. "I don't know too many people who have felt like an insider, or those people are faking it pretty well. So that was kind of the genesis for the show, that everybody there feels slightly isolated or on the outside, looking in. We're all drawing from that experience."

Herewith, the shows that will make those whom "Chuck" star Zachary Levi calls the "cool-challenged" genuinely cool.

David Kronke, [phone]

[e-mail] www.insidesocal.com/tv/

Chuck

8 p.m. Mondays, NBC Channel 4, premieres Sept. 24

"Chuck" is an action-comedy starring Zachary Levi as a slacker working at a big-box store -- "Buy More," a doppelganger for Best Buy -- as one of the techies in the Nerd Herd. When the CIA's database is inadvertently downloaded into Chuck's cerebral cortex, he finds himself pursued by CIA agents -- and their enemies.

McG, executive producer and director on the series, likens his show's hero to Spider-man's nebbishy secret identity, Peter Parker.

"Chuck is saying, 'Look, I'm really not fit to do what you're asking me to do,'" McG says. "There're just a lot more guys out there that look and feel and act like Chuck than there are guys that look like Tom Brady and went to the Super Bowl. It's just a way of connecting to a great many people and saying we understand and this is the voicing of the types of people who are going to watch the show."

Levi admits that, in contrast to other roles he has played, "Chuck" feels a lot closer to home.

"He's much more -- everyone is throwing around 'geek' and 'nerd' and all this," Levi says. "I would say 'cool-challenged,' maybe, if we can coin that phrase. But I find myself very much being able to be myself. I find myself being myself, I guess, playing video games and being a nerd, which I really, really am in so many ways."

During the pilot, in fact, Levi had to play scenes in a wrist cast, due not to a tricky stunt (though the pilot is rife with such) but a far more banal, even, yes, geeky injury: playing his Wii computer games at home.

"I put my hand through a light fixture in my living room, and I got 14 stitches," he confesses. "So I'm cool. Who can cut their hand open playing

Nintendo? This guy right here."

The Big Bang Theory 

8:30 p.m. Mondays, CBS Channel 2, premieres Sept. 24

"The Big Bang Theory" concerns Pasadena Caltech students Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki), geniuses in the classroom and morons in the real world, as they are reminded when they befriend -- in classically tongue-tied fashion -- their sexy neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco).

(Fun fact: The characters get their name from Sheldon Leonard, an actor-turned-TV-producer who worked on such classic series as "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "The Andy Griffith Show" and "I Spy.")

Galecki concedes he's not exactly typecast, saying he's "not nearly as intelligent as my character, but I did really well all the way through the middle of eighth grade."

Chuck Lorre, who also created "Two and a Half Men" and co-created "The Big Bang Theory" with his "Dharma and Greg" collaborator Bill Prady, is surprised that his show has become part of a geek-chic trend.

"Bill and I started out with the goal of writing about remarkable minds, people that were spectacular in their vision and their ability to see things that we can't," he insists. "That somehow gets categorized as nerds and geeks, but that's not where we started. The fact that that's happening in the culture now -- we find ourselves caught up in it, but that's fine. The comedy is in their inability to deal with everything that we take for granted."

Instead, Lorre says, the inspiration was Prady's working with people who "can figure pi to 80 decimals, but can't figure a tip on the check because the quality of service has too many intangibles."

"It's also my father-in-law, who is a pediatric rheumatologist and the author of the protocol for treating lupus in adolescents," Prady adds. "An unbelievable mind, but he doesn't understand that discussing my wife's cycle at the Thanksgiving table is socially incorrect."

Aliens in America

8:30 p.m. Mondays, The CW Channel 5, premieres Oct. 1

In "Aliens in America," Dan Byrd stars as Justin, perennial Middle- America-high-school-bully punching bag. In an effort to improve their son's social standing, Justin's parents adapt a foreign-exchange student, but are taken aback upon meeting Raja (Adhir Kalyan), a Pakistani Muslim who represents the perfect fish-out-of-water in the environs of Wisconsin.

To Justin's parents' surprise, he and Raja become fast friends.

Byrd, who has been acting since his teens, acknowledged that he can draw upon certain feelings of personal alienation for his character.

"I'm from Georgia, and I had a really comfortable set of circumstances there," he recalls. "And then, when I came out here, you know, it just sort of flipped that whole situation on its head, and all of a sudden I was kind of an outsider. And my first year of high school, I tried to go to a normal school whenever I wasn't working. And it's the one time in my life where I've had genuine problems making friends."

Series creator David Guarascio points to a classic geek-chic high-school series as an inspiration for "Aliens in America."

" 'Freaks and Geeks' has definitely been a show that we thought was fantastic and loved the honesty with which it portrayed the high-school experience, and that was definitely an influence in how we approached 'Aliens,' " he says. "Looking back on (the high-school experience), some of the things that seemed quite terrible 20 years ago, you can sort of laugh at now, and that's sort of the approach that we took."

Yet asked about his own pubescent days, he quipped, "There are some dark memories I'd rather not get into right now."

Reaper 

9 p.m. Tuesdays, The CW Channel 5,

premieres Sept. 25

"Reaper" is an action-comedy pretty similar to "Chuck," except sub out Bret Harrison for Zachary Levi and the Work Bench (a Home Depot doppelganger) for Buy More.

Harrison stars as underachiever Sam Tyler, who is understandably dismayed to learn, on his 21st birthday, that his parents sold his soul to the devil (Ray Wise), and now the devil has come to collect.

Sam is charged with collecting souls that have escaped from hell and returning them to the underground.

"Reaper" was created by Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters, who had previously collaborated on such disparate shows as "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "Ed," and were inspired by the comic zombie flick "Shaun of the Dead."

"What I liked about 'Shaun of the Dead' was these two ordinary guys who were too hungover to realize that the world's been taken over by zombies, and I started to think about these kinds of kids, who are in their 20s, who had gone to college, and who live in a nice suburb, a nice house, and have a nice car and an Xbox and all the comforts of home," Fazekas recalls.

"And if they are not really motivated to do anything, why would you leave to live in a crappy apartment downtown?" she continues. "So we kind of married those two ideas together."

"Our world really is the world of the mundane, and these fantastic elements happen in it," Butters adds.

Harrison, like Levi, brings an amusingly unpretentious sensibility to his role, insisting he's thoroughly unprepared for his character's action stunts.

Recently, he recalls, "They rigged a wire up my leg that goes through my arm so I have to get shocked. They assured me that I wouldn't get hurt. I'm not giving away the story or anything, but I was basically electrocuted up through my whole body."

But such abuse, Harrison concedes, is the geek's lot in life.

"I'm very used to it at this point now. I'm just a big (wussy).

I'm an innocent-looking guy."

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) NERDS ON TV

Geeks squad finds a home on the small screen

(2) Zachary Levi plays the title character of the show "Chuck," which is about an ordinary guy who inadvertently has the CIA database downloaded into his brain.

(3) Sheldon (Jim Parsons, left) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki) are two Caltech students who have a hot neighbor in "The Big Bang Theory."

(4) Dan Byrd, left, as Justin and Adhir Kalyan as Raja star in "Aliens in America" on The CW.

(5) Bret Harrison as Sam and Tyler Labine as Sock star in "Reaper" on The CW.