Gunfinger - General - The "Humor" of G4TV

I continue to not like G4TV to this day. Probably my mistake was turning to the very station, hoping that a newly formatted "Attack of the Show" would somehow be better. Sadly, I was wrong about change, and right about crap. The gaming community not only felt betrayed, but surpised when AOTS claimed they would bring everyone videos from the Internet no one had yet known about. Leeroy Jenkins took less than 4 days to become fully innocuated as an Internet phenom, YTMND took quite a while, but after the launch of YTMND.com, the acronym became a house-hold phrase among lunchtime banter in highschools across the nation.

I was one of the lucky ones who grew up at the right time in America to know G4 would be nothing good, and I didn't expect it to. Every television network directed, produced and edited by anyone who only has film experience in dry humor, repetative satire, and ineffective "shock" television is asking for failure. However, I was constantly asking myself what it was about G4 that made them horribly, horribly dry.

The jokes, on their own were bad, but the most appealing thing about any joke is the delivery and it hits me. Watching the "E3 06 Live" special (which I should probably tell you, always had "Previously recorded" stuck in the corner for the first 20 seconds of the broadcast), it seemed like the hosts were reading from cue cards. The jokes were too cute. Even when Kevin Prereria (spelling ftl) was questioning the integrity of multiplayer gaming on day 2, there was no edge to it. He made fun of Microsoft on numerous occasions, then did the same to Sony, eventually declaring indirectly he hated all three competitors with absolutely no passion.

So there it was. The fact of G4, it's scripted. Read by young, hip buffoons who want a job in the limelight and will say whatever corporate pundits tell them to. Politically correct or not, true or false, passionate or stale as rye bread. There's no passion to G4, and that's something that will never change in retrospect to it's predicesor, TechTV.