G4
Yesterday, after more than 12 years of mediocre-at-best existence, G4 Network has finally shut down. Formerly the premier video game channel on TV, G4 had been circling the drain for years. All its awful original shows long have dried up, while plans had been formed to turn G4 into the Esquire Network last year.
The sad, pathetic way G4 crawled to its death offers some poetic justice. It is only fitting that a channel that named its late-night programming Midnight Spank should go out airing reruns of Cops and Heroes.
The story of G4 is one of two distinctly different channels: A scrappy underdog with the budget of poorly funded high school musical and an insanely embarrassing corporate attempt at courting the Mountain Dew-chugging, Doritos-munching marketing ideal of a gamer.
I wish I could say that the former was any good, but it wasn’t. The low-fi aesthetic and production values only served to make everything feel pathetic. There wasn’t much in the way of scrappy charm, especially when the varying hosts tried way too hard.
Judgment Day’s forced attempts to capture some kind of banter between the two hosts was almost as bad the lousy green screening. Icons had a decent idea — a series of talking heads covering video game history — let down by a godawful narrator and shoddy attempts at copying Ken Burns.
There was some good content on G4 in its heyday. Cinematech consisted only of game trailers and footage bookended with psychedelic title cards, but its purity of form and content was appreciated, especially in the pre-YouTube era.
X-Play’s reviews were of little intellectual heft, but the show’s eagerness to dabble in absurd, self-deprecatory skits and the hosts’ decent chemistry made it a fairly appealing variety act. Attack of the Show had … well, it could at least occasionally pretend it was an actual talk show.
I do, in fact, have some fond memories of watching G4 when there was absolutely nothing else on. On the other hand, the latter stage of G4’s life went to some dark places. Judgment Day may have looked embarrassingly cheap, but at least it wasn’t filled with overtrained media personalities pretending to dig nerd culture.
And, of course, this G4 gave us the Midnight Spank block, filled with lovely programming like Cinematech: Nocturnal Emissions and G4’s Late Night Peep Show. Charming. There was also Happy Tree Friends, but that only counted as a positive relative to the rest of G4’s shows.
Did G4 do any lasting damage? Probably not. A couple of episodes of Attack of the Show did turn me off from video games during high school, but only briefly. While G4 did totally s— the bed for video game TV channels and shows, YouTube personalities since have deftly filled the gap.
I don’t know what G4’s legacy will be. I just hope it stays dead.
