Kyle Chandler vs. George Eads
Battle of the Southern Charmers

Southern men can signify, in pop-cultural products, in many different ways. There's the Tim Blake Nelson brand of slack-jawed yokel. There's the Charles Durning flavour of flop-sweaty Dixie lawyer. There's the Michael Rooker-type old-school virulent bigot. And then there's the southern gentleman: courtly, well-mannered, sweet, and maybe a little bit dim or at least unworldly. It's this last southern archetype that George Eadsand Kyle Chandler have been trying to reinvent throughout their careers. We say trying, because in many ways, they're still the same old honey-voiced charmers that we've always loved.

Chandler may be trying just a leeeetle harder than Eads to subvert his squeaky-clean image as TV's favourite southern sweetheart. First, he was an earnest '40s-era hunk in the unjustly short-lived drama Homefront. From there, he went on to play an earnest crime-solver in the proudly square Pax mainstay Early Edition, as a guy who (no, seriously) happens to receive the next day's newspaper, thus getting tasked with preventing various calamities before they occur. Chandler later played an earnest love interest for the titular Joan Cusack in What About Joan. So far, so sweet, right?

Well, perhaps that's what Chandler thought, too -- finally noticing that he was getting pigeonholed as TV's favourite pretty, squinty doormat, because he showed up last fall in The Lyon's Den, NBC's legal drama/post-West Wing Rob Lowe comeback vehicle. We know we're the last people alive who are still protesting this show's too-prompt cancellation; even Rob Lowe himself has probably erased it from his memory by now. But we actually thought it was pretty good -- trashy and melodramatic, to be sure, but sometimes that's what you feel like watching on a Sunday night. Anyway, Chandler played Grant, a very bitchy lawyer. (Frances Fisher played his scheming and awesomely soapy secretary, who slapped him once, awesomely.) We never really got a chance to discover exactly what was up Chandler's ass, and not knowing why he despised Lowe's dull, sanctimonious Jack so damn much kind of makes us like him more; that his animosity is apparently baseless and groundless automatically puts us on Grant's team. (And you know what's buried in Grant's team? Well, it's...oh, wait. We're thinking of something else.) Grant was a southerner, and charming in that kind of smarmy way that TV lawyers almost always have, but sweet, or dim? No, ma'am.

Eads has had, if you can believe it, a career even less diverse than Chandler's. He started out -- as far as we are concerned, anyway -- as a super-hot, gentle, courtly paramedic on ER, with whom Julianna Margulies's Carol briefly made out, jeopardizing her relationship with George Clooney's Doug Ross. The actor chosen to play this role would have a monumental challenge in having to be adorable enough that the viewer would believe Carol would cheat with him...ON GEORGE CLOONEY; it speaks directly to Eads's attractive southern charm (and rock-hard abs) that he pulled it off convincingly.

Since then, Eads has had a couple of TV movie roles (we hear; we have no truck with TV movies -- particularly not TV movies containing Tom Selleck, like the Eads starrer Monte Walsh) on his various hiatuses from C.S.I., the top-rated show on TV the last two years running. As C.S.I.'s Nick Stokes, Eads is the lab's resident naïf: he's not street-smart like ex-stripper Catherine or ex-gambling addict Warrick, nor a socially maladjusted science nerd like Sara and Gil. So on the one hand, Nick does sort of update the image of the southern charmer -- he is smart, and uses his brain to solve crimes as well as his sweet nature to disarm suspects. But on the other, he's still teased as the lab longhorn, charged to solve the crimes that relate to spurs and manure and...um, other Texas-y things, like, uh, barbecue. And, uh...yellow roses. And the Alamo. Trust us: they really do put his southern-ness to work on C.S.I. a lot. And when Nick figures something out that's stumped everyone else, it's regarded as an anomaly, because he's just a good ol' boy, y'all! Yeeeeeeeehaw! [shoots pistols into the air]

It's tough for Chandler and Eads that they have played such similar nice-southern-guy roles in their careers -- not just because they look so much alike on paper, but because they look so much alike...in life. They're not twins, but they easily could be brothers. Really, really hot brothers.

Advantage: Eads, but that's really only because his show is still on.