A Nice Niche, but Probably Not a Career Path of Choice

I started catching up on season 3 of The Guild this week, and was pleasantly surprised to see everyone's favorite Starfleet alumn, Wil Wheaton.

I keep running into Wheaton over the last few months, and think I've spotted a trend. Wheaton, who spent years being the target of the spite of geeks everywhere because he was cast as Wesley Crusher (and honestly, most of the blame for the Crusher stuff belongs to the writers/producers, if you ask me). Now, Wheaton's basically embraced that spite, and turned it into affection via his blog, books, appearances, etc. And how he's taken it a step further, and he's turned it into a niche career, I've run into him as:

• hacker Colin Mason, foil of beloved hacker Alec Hardison on Leverage
• MMORPG player, foil of the much beloved Codex on The Guild
• former child actor/gamer/douchebag Wil Wheaton, foil of beloved uber-nerd Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory

He's gone beyond being the unjust target of spite, to being the geek we're all supposed to hate. Nice way to turn lemons into imdb credits.

I just remembered him playing a real prick of a comic collector on Numb3rs a couple of years ago, too, now that I think of it...so this isn't a totally new thing, just something he's doing more often, and with a certain focus.