Breaking News: Nobody Watches G4!

First, read the article on Variety that explains why I would even bother with a post about G4 in the first place. Now, enjoy the show.

It's the classic tale of meteoric rise and subsequent cataclysmic fall.It's the age old scenario; two useless channels merge, the shows from one channel get completely axed negating the merger, not-really-but-sorta-kinda-Frankenstein channel emerges, and still no one watches. The kind of story that Behind the Music would have killed for. It's a twisted and convoluted lineage almost as confusing at the family tree of the House of Plantagenet. It's the sordid, salacious, and even lecherous tale of G4, the channel dedicated to to video games that no one gives a shit about.


Let's hop into our little cardboard transmogrification box and go way back, way way back, into the year 1998. This is the year that Columbus first discovered the internet. In 1998 there were two little companies that had little shows that focused on computers and the internet. Their was CNET, with its little shows CNET Central, The Web, and The Edge. And then their was ZDTV, which I honestly don't have a clue what shows they had other than the eponymous ZDTV. ZDTV got bought out and became TechTV when Ziff-Davis (the ZD in ZDTV) got snagged by CNET. Tech TV had a bunch of shows that ran the gamut from a computer how-to show, The Screen Savers, to other shit nobody watched cause it was pretty much only The Screen Savers. On occasion two or three people watched Robot Wars.

Without a damn thing worth watching, TechTV entered a period of flux where shows came on, sucked, and went off. They tried a 9-hour live show, ingeniously titled TechLive, which sucked, and got cut into smaller and smaller itterations until getting canceled. Then in 2004 some genius at the Comcast owned G4 Media thought "Hey! This channel is absolute crap. Let's buy it!" and they did. They briefly called the mutant channel G4techTV, effectively lined all the shows and hosts up and shot them one by one, smiling a bit more each time they pulled the trigger, and dropped the techTV moniker and pretty much ended up with exactly what they started with.

G4's origins are a little more straight forward. They came on the air in 2002 showing nothing but a never ending game of pong for a few weeks, and then launched a bunch of shows that either don't exist anymore, or have changed drastically. They whored themselves out pretty early, selling product placement into their shows. After the TechTV/G4 merger, G4 also did away with a majority of their programming and began to adopt the MTV concept of being a channel for gamers, but not really showing a whole lot of gaming shows. Leaving G4 to pretty much be a show dedicated to endless reruns of Ninja Warrior, interupted only by the occasional syndicated show (like the high class Cheaters) and reruns of Lost and Heroes. Leaving the only gaming shows to be Xplay and Attack of the Show, and really people only give a shit about Attack of the Show, and even then if Olivia Munn takes the day off I don't even watch that. Now with the newly announced cutbacks of the only game related shows on the network, the only thing that is likely to be left by the end of the year game related will be the commercials.