Changing Channels

We have an early leader in the quote of the year competition. This one comes from “The Flying Tomato” Shaun White, winner of the Snowboard Half Pipe gold medal. It’s on his possible endorsement windfall. “I think it’s better to buy real estate than say, a yellow and purple Corvette or an elephant that can speak sign language. My parents help me a lot with that stuff. They don’t want to see me when I’m 30, dead broke, selling bootleg tapes of my snowboard movies on the side of the freeway.”

My first thought when I read that quote was “I somehow don’t think that Jim Thorpe said that when he won his gold medals.” I then realized, “Given that Jim Thorpe effectively did end up selling bootleg tapes of his career on the side of the freeway this kid really has his head on his shoulders.” Though having an elephant that could speak sign language would be friggin awesome.

Ok, I’ve often mentioned my dismay that MTV no longer has anything to do with music. That is a recognized fact but it was one that was a gradual process. You watched it over the years and suddenly realized that you could not remember the last time you saw a video and when you read the Video Music Awards nominees you couldn’t recognize any of them. Well, I’ve spent the past few months watching another channel completely change its focus and I need to write about it.

The channel is G4TV, the channel for video gamers by video gamers. As you can tell, this is pretty much niche programming. When I started watching it last year the entire program schedule was based on video games. This was good (with X Play having some of the best writing on the air and Attack of the Show providing me with all of the industry insights that I need in an hour show) and bad, as watching other people play video games is nowhere near as interesting as one would imagine. So, while not all of the programming was of a high quality you at least knew if you turned to that channel you would see video games.

Then they started to air shows like Street Fury, which was about drift racing. Ok, maybe it wasn’t a game but it was somewhat interesting. Then they started airing Fastlane, a show that lasted about eight episodes on Fox and that was just because it had one of the girls from Baywatch in it. A questionable choice, but it also involved fast cars. A few months ago they started airing episodes of The Man Show, which given the typical gamer is actually a pretty wise programming choice. Of course, it has nothing to do with video games but it hits the demographic.

In keeping with this vein, at the start of the year they started to show Star Trek: The Next Generation. Again, a good choice for video gamers but now the entire prime time schedule has absolutely nothing to do with video games. Despite the fact that it is the title of the network. And finally, to just push the envelope even more, next week they will have a series featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. It’s pretty much at the point where they should rename the channel Spike TV light.

I understand why they’ve done this, it’s not like the network was getting any viewers with the old lineup. But it’s rather stunning to see a channel completely reinvent itself in a little over six months. And you know what? I miss the fact that I knew that I could flip the channel and watch people play video games. It just removes one more channel from my internal program list when I flip around.