G4-TechTV still sucks, and it's getting worse
Sarah Lane and Kevin Rose both blogged that they cut a bunch of people from The Screen Savers and killed Unscrewed all together. Apparently the aren't enough shows with pairs of unattractive and uninteresting men talking about video games. What particularly sucks about this is all of the people they let go of were lured down to LA from the bay area, and a few months later, they're out.
And for what? When things finally started to settle, I was starting to accept the evolved shows. X-Play went relatively untouched, fortunately, and it's the only gaming show on the network that I can stand (hopefully the success has not gone to Morgan's head). They took some hilarious stabs in the first show about moving to LA. Unscrewed was the same goofy shit, and frankly was at the very least a change of pace from everything else on the network. The Screen Savers got a little too frat party, but it was grounded in the credibility of Kevin and Sarah (attractive people that aren't stupid), and Yoshi, the Jedi master of hardware. I wasn't sure about Alex (he was no Leo or Patrick), but he wasn't bad.
I fear now that the network for smart geeks is done for good, and all of the smart people that made it special are out on their asses. They may blog that "it's part of the biz," but I disagree. This kind of TV is not rocket science. I produced more interesting government access shows when I did that stuff. It's still about informative, interesting and entertaining content. Most G4 programming is none of the above.
Sigh. There's so little worth watching on TV as it is.