I can’t in all honesty say that Eureka (Tuesday nights, Sci-Fi Channel) is a great show. But it’s just silly and geeky enough that I really enjoy it.

Running up to last Tuesday’s season opener, there was a campaign sponsored by Degree For Men, promoting Eureka via a bunch of crazy “new inventions” that might have been created by the denizens of the show. They were actually pretty amusing and had strong branding from both show and deodorant.

Now, in the past I’ve griped loudly about product placements in television shows. Smallville, for instance, is notorious for this, with some really cringe-worthy placements over the years. But a lot of shows do it. So when I was watching the first new Eureka of the new season, and the crew was walking through a room filled with boxes with “Degree for Men” labels plastered on the outside, I was drawing breath for a total, full-on rant about how horrible it was. And at that moment, main character Sheriff Carter pointed at the boxes and said “What’s all this?” and the new head of the research lab said brightly “Oh! It’s our first sponsor. It’s very exciting!!” and all the rant went out of me and I found myself laughing out loud. I mean, if you’re going to do a product placement, that seemed like the way to do it. It was funny, and broke the ‘4th wall’ enough to offer viewers a wink and a nod. Yeah, they know we hate this stuff, but they gotta pay the bills.

One other neat Eureka note. They had a banner advertising the Twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/_S_A_R_A_H_. What’s fun is that whomever is monitoring that account is answering in the personal of the show’s “Smart House” SARAH. Pretty funny stuff, and another nice nod to us geeks who enjoy the show.