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G4 Moves Further From Technology Roots
Variety has a piece detailing some new hires at G4, all designed to further move the channel away from its technology roots. From the article: "One of Finn's priorities will be to scout people to profile when 'Icons' relaunches this summer. The 'Biography'-style skeinskein has been revamped to focus on figures that appeal to young men, including J.J. Abrams and Bryan SingerBryan Singer. She'll also continue to strengthen the lineup of guests visiting G4's live, studio-based series. In addition, both 'Filter' and 'Attack of the Show' will be relaunched in June with a scaled-back focus on technology. Heavier emphasis will be on attitude, humor and a broader range of male-oriented topics."
Is there any reason to watch this channel anymore...?
Targeted programming pretty much always sucks.
Good shows might appeal more to one demographic than another, but a good show is a good show.
For example, you can make a show like "Gilmour Girls" and 30-something women will like it more than most other folks, resulting in a "cult hit" within that demographic, and TV people love it when that happens, because it makes selling ad time easier... but if you get a bunch of executives to say "we need to find a show that hits the Gilmour Girls market", that show will almost certainly be a complete train wreck, because they are not setting out to make a good show that will happen to click with certain people, but setting out to click with those people and the need for it to be good is a distant second.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Yeah, I've noticed program changes with Adult Swim. Someone tell me why they are showing "Saved by the Bell" on Adult Swim?
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
An old penny-arcade comic commented on how games are now marketted at the cool kids. Not the geeks anymore.
I recently played the new Tomb Raider and I noticed something. In the first game she was a geekie kinda girl. Sure physically fit and rich but you could tell she would rather read a good book then go clubbing. A dork with tits.
But over the years she been getting further and further away from that to the point where she now seems to have some "cool" dudes hanging out with her and having totally changed her way of talking.
It seems to me very clear that this game is being marketted at a different audience. This is a game for cool kids who look, or at least think they look, like the characters in the game. Geeks need not apply.
The reason is offcourse obvious, marketshare. If you got the geek market then obviously you want to expand that to the non-geek market and so you add some stuff, remove some stuff and then wonder what the fuck happened because nobody is watching anymore.
I like to call the effect, BBC program being raped by the yanks. BBC is geekie. They got ugly losers losing in the game that is life. Wether that is red dwarf or scapheap challenge it is about fat sad people being normal.
Give that to an american producer and he will attempt to cool it up. Search for Red Dwarf american pilot for a real horror show. The american version of scrapheap challenge removes the team factor (instead having the nightmare of all geeks, the being picked by the team leader leading to the horror of being the last one picked, remember that from school?), adds meaningless radiochatter and camera movements and in general looks like a show that feels american. Ugh.
Sadly it sells. Face it, we as geeks are not a big enough group. Even if a product is successfull at targetting us it is only a matter of time until some person looking for promotion suggest altering it to appeal to a larger audience.
Old tv shows don't die, they just get reworked to appeal to more and more people until finally nobody watches anymore.
MTV has become a joke for being the music station that no longer airs music. It was so much a joke that other stations sprang up to replace it. Now they too are starting with more and more non-music. Why? Because we got this insane law that forbids us from shooting people from marketting.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can still remember back in the day when this channel was ZDTV... I was all excited when my satellite provider added a new computer channel that I stumbled on one day. I remember watching Dvorak argue with people, seeing hardware reviews, news programs... it was cool to be a nerd.
Then ZDTV turned into TechTV and it was still good. I loved The Screen Savers with Leo and Patrick (and Kate before that), Call for Help, plus the news and hardware reviews (Fresh Gear)... even the X Play show was cool back then (it was Extended Play and didn't include Morgan Webb). There was even anime and stuff, but it still felt in line with the tech/nerd culture.
Even TechTV started to go downhill though... with shows like Unscrewed with Martin Sergeant (poser), Wired for Sex, and the hundred reruns of Robot Wars. But it completely fell apart when G4 bought it, and I've only watched about three shows on it since the buyout (all of them were Icons).
Now I'm just waiting for someone else to make a real tech channel the caliber of the old ZDTV/TechTV. It's not like they have any competition...
Come on people, there's got to be somebody out there that can make that happen - take the best of what G4 cast off, and create a true technology channel.
Do the kinds of programs Discover and History don't - Popular Science and Popular Mechanics (especially those "top secret" specials). Concentrate on computers and video games... Leave the sports video game coverage for G4 - they turn every E3 into a giant commercial for EA sports, anyways.
Profile the geeky side of celebrities, whether it's some actor spending endless hours on WoW or a jock who sits up late into the night playing Star Wars Galaxies.
We also need news - not like anything anywhere else, but the happenings on your latest MMORPG or the most recent shuffling of developer houses among publishers. News about betas and bugs, virii and easter eggs. Sure other stations may get around to having a special on the quest for the X-Prize, but we want to know the juicy details AS THEY UNFOLD.
TechTV probably got three times the viewers G4 did, but TV execs are morons. It's an old boys network, and they just don't get the target demographic. Others have mentioned the ruination of Adult Swim, and more obviosuly, the parallel with MTV's descent into vidiocy. We've seen the unfailing ABILITY of these jackasses to turn a good thing into crap, and their complete INABILITY to see the terrible result for what it is.
I never tune into G4 anymore. Even X-Play is unbearable, and everything else is Spike TV rejects. Ugh. It needs to just go off and die.
G4 is dead. The time for SlashDot TV has finally come!!!