Believe
it or not, I only discovered The Guild
just after season 5 came out. Somehow I had remained completely
unaware of its existence until then. It’s odd because many of my
friends apparently knew of it.
“What, you’d never seen The Guild before?” they asked when I mentioned finally seeing it.“No,” I replied.“You mean we’ve never mentioned it before?”“No.”“Really?”“Really.”
It’s
odd, too, because many websites I often visit are exactly the kinds
of sites that would mention it, but if they did, I somehow missed
every reference. At any rate, it was after season 5 came out that I
finally started noticing mentions here and there of a web show called
The Guild and starring
Felicia Day. I certainly knew who Felicia Day was, so I was intrigued
and checked it out, starting right at the beginning with season 1.
And
I was hooked. Soon, I had not only watched the whole series, but I
had also purchased the DVDs of all five seasons (to be fair, watching
a whole season is about the same time commitment as watching a single
movie, so it’s not that
amazing a feat that I got through the whole series in about a week or
so). The series was a wonderful breath of fresh air, full of funny
characters who, while crazy and over-the-top, were still relatable.
Here was a show about geeks and written by geeks, a show that could
poke fun at the idiosyncrasies and stereotypes of geek culture whilst
never hiding the fact that it was also a love letter to geek culture.
Shows about geeks have gained a certain popularity in recent years
with the rise of programmes like The Big Bang Theory.
But that show, while about nerds, is aimed at the masses, and is
clearly written by people who don’t really understand what it is to
be a geek or nerd and so rely entirely on stereotypes. Felicia Day,
on the other hand, is a geek of the first order, and that breathes a
life and reality into The Guild
that the Big Bang Theory can
only dream of attaining.
