Smart Guy (TV series)

Smart Guy is a sitcom that aired on The WB and is the sister series to Sister, Sister (Pun intended.) It stars Tia and Tamera Mowry's real-life brother Tahj, playing as T.J. Henderson, a kid genius who gets skipped up from the 4th grade to the 10th grade, to the dismay of T.J.'s older brother, Marcus, as T.J. now goes to Marcus' school. The show primarily focuses on T.J. trying to adjust to high school.

Not to be confused with The Smart Guy.

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Tropes used in Smart Guy (TV series) include:

• A-Cup Angst: One episode features Yvette auditioning for a role in a play, but being passed over for a more developed actress. She then proceeds to stuff her bra to see if she would have gotten the part if she was bustier.
• Aside Glance: T.J. gives one after Marcus and Mo give their approval for T.J.'s choice for a new drummer... who happens to be a girl in their age group, so yeah...
• Black and Nerdy: (TJ)
• Book Dumb: (Marcus)
• Celebrity Star: (Destiny's Child)
• Cloudcuckoolander: (Mo on occasion)
• Cool Old Guy: Floyd.
• Crossover: On Sister, Sister with T.J. being hired as an S.A.T tutor to the girls. Ray, Tamera's father, even title drops T.J's show.
• Deadpan Snarker: Mostly T.J. and Yvette, though they definitely both get it from Floyd.
  • Even Mo gets in on the act sometimes, though usually with him it's less deadpan and more "cheerfully snide" one-liners.
• Death Glare: Pretty much everyone in the family is good at giving these, especially T.J. Often accompanies a Beat joke.
• Drop-In Character: (Mo)
• Easy Amnesia: (Subverted. One episode has T.J. getting hit in the head and becoming stupid as a result. Mo suggests they hit him in the head again, but they don't because This Is Reality.)
• Happily Adopted: Mo, he had a happy relationship with his adopted parents, then discovered he was adopted and went searching for biological parents dismissing his adoptive parents. At the end of the episode he realizes that he is fine with his adoptive parents.
• Heterosexual Life Partners: Mo and Marcus
• Insufferable Genius: T.J.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: T.J. again.
• Instant Cultured: Averted in this case. T.J. having the interests of both a kid and a genius is a running theme, though one episode has him sad that he can't get into The Three Stooges like his dad and brother.
• I Want You to Meet An Old Friend of Mine: (Tia and Tamera Mowry, Tahj's sisters, guest star in one episode.)
• Missing Mom: The mother already passed away prior to the series' start.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Whenever the group has to trick somebody for whatever Zany Scheme is going on, it's a fair bet T.J. will have to do this and pretend to be a regular (even overly irritating) kid.
  • One episode also has him do this after a bonk on the head makes him actually stupid, and then after his smarts return he decides he likes how people treat him when he's not smarter than them better.
• Oblivious Adoption: (One episode has Mo discovering that he's adopted and he seeks his birth mother.)
• Manipulative Bastard: Less on the "bastard" part, but T.J. is very good at manipulating people to get what he wants (or for what he thinks is someone's own good), and every once in a while an episode or subplot revolves around him doing so. To his credit, though, he is always very apologetic about it, and tends to go out his way to make amends.
• Not So Above It All: A major joke in the show is the contrast between T.J. being a Wise Beyond His Years genius and being a naive immature kid at the same time.
• Profiling: One day Yvette gets her friend Nina to try for a job at a store at the mall. Yay! It turns out that the job involves following black people to make sure they don't steal. Awkward.
  • Even more awkward because Yvette was also hired in the same store, which the manager uses to claim her profiling isn't racist. Right...
  • This also bites the manager in the butt later on when she ends up doing this to the founder of the store, in other words, her boss. Things aren't going to end well for her and her job.
• Ship Tease: Between Mo and Yvette, more and more as the show went on.
• A Simple Plan: Several.
• Smart People Play Chess: T.J., as revealed in the "T.J. versus the Machine" episode.
• Smug Snake: Recurring general louse Deion, who has several jobs over the course of the series, all of which seem to involve smoothly using someone else so he can make a buck. Amped up to eleven in the episode where he wanted to date Yvette.
• Start My Own: When the cost of soda went up to over a dollar, T.J. began to create his own.
• Tempting Fate: After Floyd returns from his camping trip with T.J., he complains to Yvette about all the things that went wrong during the trip and vows never to return to the camping site again. Then this happens:

Yvette: Where's T.J.?
Floyd: Oh, crud. (walks back out the door)

• Theme Tune: In the first season, it was a light, poppy Expository Theme Tune: "Another slice in the life of Master T.J. Henderson". In the second, it was changed to a more soulful, R&B theme about living life and loving and learning lessons. Both versions contain the refrain: "He's a smaaaaart guyyy..."
• Token White: (Nina and Macky)
• Two-Timer Date: Yvette, Floyd, and Marcus try to get TJ dates for the upcoming dance, but because they didn't tell the other (and because TJ fears saying "no" to their choices would hurt his family), he ended up getting three dates, and Mo's suggestion to hide it makes it hilariously worse.
  • Also invoked on Marcus, who unwittingly ends up asking twins out. See I Want You to Meet An Old Friend of Mine above.
• Very Special Episode: (The Internet stalker episode, the Profiling episode, as well as the alcohol episode.)
• Written-In Absence: There was an episode where TJ was absent for most of the episode. This was explained in-episode with him being at a Science camp, a process that also severely drained Floyd's account and thus forced Yvette and Marcus to get jobs (the latter of whom also ended up choosing the worst possible job for him: Late Night Radio Talk).
• You Know I'm Black, Right?
• Your Mom: The dirty dozens are Serious Business for Mo and Marcus, who treat it like a martial art, even bowing before and after a match. Hilarity Ensues when they attempt to instruct TJ.