Jenna Fischer vs. Linda Cardellini
Battle of the Fake-Mousy Babes

You know that whole movie and TV and commercial (let's be honest, really) music-video cliché where a girl is all plain and dull -- or so you think until she takes off her glasses, pulls her hair out of its bun, and strips off her high-necked dress to reveal a body-skimming satiny slip and then you realize she was totally hot all along and we just couldn't tell? You know, because...of the glasses? It was already pretty played-out when She's All That was more or less that sentence stretched out into a ninety-minute movie, and then it only got more played out when Not Another Teen Movie parodied it, and so you'd think that, five years after that, we'd all be savvy enough to understand that just giving a girl bushy eyebrows or a Sears wardrobe isn't enough to trick us all into overlooking how cute she is, but the careers of Linda Cardellini and Jenna Fischer should prove that, actually, we aren't that savvy after all.

Because, here's the thing about Jenna Fischer and Linda Cardellini: they are both babes. Cardellini was in this spread in InStyle earlier this year where they showed her getting done up for the Golden Globes and she was a total knockout -- gorgeous hair, great dress, lovely skin, beautiful smile, date who seemed okay even though he wasn't her longtime boyfriend Jason Segel (snif!). But you'd never know how great she could look if all you'd seen her play was Freaks & Geeks's Lindsay Weir, shuffling around her high school in dumpy jeans and her father's old army jacket. Or as Velma in the Scooby Doo movies, stuffed into that horrible orange turtleneck that gives her phantom fat rolls and uni-boob, and let's not even get started on the bowl cut. Or as Chutney in Legally Blonde, with that horrendous plot point of a perm. Even as Sam on ER, Cardellini is styled all frumpy. Yeah, you can argue that hospital scrubs are unforgiving, but until this season (when she started wearing dapper separates), Sarah Chalke rocked them on...well, Scrubs. If Sam looks bad on ER, though, maybe it's because having such a rotten child has aged her prematurely. (And the fluorescents in Trauma Green don't help, either.)

Fischer has been more fortunate than Cardellini: she may not have had to dig deep to create a rich backstory to play "College Girl" (The Specials), "Sorority Girl 1" (Lucky 13), "Hostess" (Melvin Goes To Dinner), and "Bitchy French Girl" (Superficiales, Les), but at least the fact that they weren't called "Wallflower" or "Dowdy Girl" or "Frump" or "Bitchy French Girl Covered In Boils" suggests that at the very least that none of them was there only to be memorably plain. She was also styled perfectly fine as Rico (Freddy Rodriguez)'s love interest Sharon in the final season of Six Feet Under -- and, better even than looking cute, she had the pleasure of blowing off his leprechaun ass. However, in the role for which she is probably best known -- Pam on the suddenly immensely popular American version of The Office -- Fischer...could look better. And it's not her fault -- Pam, engaged to a coarse, soul-killing lunkhead, is probably a fine candidate for a course of Paxil, so it follows that she doesn't really care to do more with her listless perm than stick some of it back in a barrette, and hasn't updated her idea of office clothes since she went on her first-ever job interview at age sixteen (it's the only way we can account for those depressing greige cardigans, chino skirts, and sub-Naturalizer flats). Girl, when even the office's judgmental Christian looks more put-together than you do, it's time to take a personal day and spend it at Nordstrom. Our point, though, is that even disguised as the indifferently groomed Pam, there's no concealing the fact that Fischer is really very pretty indeed; the most heartwarming part of nearly any episode of The Office is when she gets to crack one of Pam's comparatively rare smiles.

How do the two fake frumps stack up against each other? Well, you can't give the edge to the one who's hooked up with Judd Apatow, since each has been, at one time or another: Cardellini on the aforementioned Geeks, and Fischer in two episodes of Undeclared and an uncredited role in The 40 Year-Old Virgin. Making some arbitrary ruling as to who's got the most experience or who's the young upstart doesn't quite work either, since the two were born about a year apart -- and both look much younger than they are, anyway. You can credit Fischer's initiative in writing and directing her own film, LolliLove, in which she also stars...alongside Linda Cardellini. Cardellini was more recently in a highly awarded film -- playing one of Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger)'s poor, deceived female companions in Brokeback Mountain -- but in a very small role, whereas Fischer is in the critically beloved TV show and Cardellini's is rapidly rolling downhill, gaining speed with each passing season.

We're not saying this decision isn't tough. But here's the thing: other than ER -- which we quit watching years ago -- Cardellini's most recent credit is Grandma's Boy, a film Adam Sandler was willing to produce, but not to star in, leaving that to lesser members of his entourage. Whereas Fischer is currently shooting Blades Of Glory, a comedy in which she plays younger sister to a brother-sister figure-skating team played by Will Arnett and Amy Poehler, and she's currently in theatres in the awesomely disgusting gross-out flick Slither, written by her husband, James "Dawn Of The Dead Remake" Gunn. It's not impossible that Cardellini will recapture her Freaks & Geeks-era glory and dominate Fischer at some hypothetical future point, but for now, this victory belongs entirely to...

Advantage: Fischer