G4 Rewind

We all have good fun complaining about G4's lack of programming guise and their total lack of respect to fans, but where's the fabled "right-track" and how does a network that has no solid fanbase connect to a very reserved, very critical group such as ourselves?

While I know nothing about running a profitable television station, I do know something about rambling incoherrantly on the internet. Here's G4 Rewind's Official "Road to Glory - An Enjoyable G4 for All by 2008: First Edition: Chapter 1"

Hosts are pretty much your link to the audience. If your hosts are stiff and uninteresting, then your audience gets bored fast.

Let's jump back to 2002 for a minute. If you watched G4, it would appear to be pretty low budget, but the hosts in general were EXCITED and seemed to genuinely care about what they were talking about. Not only that, you could hop on the Portal forums and read multiple threads and posts from Dave, the show's host or you could go to the IRC chat room and discuss gaming with Scot Rubin or Cory Rouse hosts of G4TV.com and Cheat, respectively. The hosts remembered people's names, they responded to emails and they liked to hear what people had to say. On-air, there was games, polls, live callers, forum quotes and more involving viewers and free schwag was abundant.

Flash foward to 2007. Have you ever seen Adam Sessler post on the X-Play boards? Has Kristin Holt ever visited ANY chat room? Sure, Attack of the Show has a poll every now and then and one in a blue moon the hosts will post on the message board, but do any of them even really care? The answer is a firm NO. Do you think Olivia Munn cares about or even PLAYS Halo? Has Kristin Holt even heard of any of the games she gives you walkthroughs for? I'm sorry to say, if you believe they do, you're kidding yourself. Most of the network's personalities are just in limbo, working G4 until they make it big or finally give up and change careers. G4 is just a stepping stone for them.

That's not to say this wasn't the same back in 2002, but hosts like Cory Rouse, Tina Wood, Laura Foy, Scott Rubin, Dave and Diane Mizota put themselves into their work and made themselves at the very least APPEAR much more genuine than today's teleprompter reading, "what club am I hitting up after work" hosts. A more appropriate word would be actors. These aren't hosts, they're actors. They've been hired for eye candy or because they can read a script with moderate enthusiasm. The only exception could be Kevin Pereira who has been with the network forever, but his former rather geeky tendencies and delights seem to have been suppressed in recent years.

The bottom line is this: unrelatable hosts mean alienated audiences. Bring back people who care and maybe we'll start to.