Welcome to the weekend! Today we're going back to the past, but not too far back. This time we're not even going back to the 20th century.
Do you remember television? If so, you're probably old. It's fairly irrelevant as a medium now, but back in the 20th century, it was king. However, much like cinema, it's currently on the way out as popular entertainment, relegated to the history books.
But, I digress. Let us put ourselves back in a time when it mattered.
In 2002, a TV network called G4 launched into the world, and it ended up shaping the tastes of a lot of Millennials who grew up with it. It was a cable network focused on video games, at least at first, before becoming the first geek culture hub on television. But what you don't know is a lot of the behind the scenes weirdness involved with the network's creation.
Back in the early '00s, a channel called TechTV was one of the biggest cable networks for tech nerds. This was back when TV was so big there were niche channels for just about anything. TechTV flourished, for a time, finding its own audience. That is, until it was merged with the upstart network G4 after being bought by Comcast into being one of the first Geek Culture network, in 2004. To this day, the TechTV merger is still looked upon as a sore point for a lot of tech bros from back then, and it, in a way, was a harbinger for wider things in the culture to come. Everything would be pounded into the same mud slick or disposable entertainment.
But this is about G4 itself, and not the controversial merger, so lets keep it on topic.
If you were a young Millennial gamer, you probably have a lot of fond memories of the network, if you were a computer nerd or an older Gen Y/X gamer, you probably hated it. Especially since it influenced such programs as The Big Bang Theory and the pop cult that formed around it as the 2000s wore on. That was a strange period of television history whose reverberations are still being felt today, well over a decade after G4 ended.
That means this is a topic well worth exploring and looking into. Thankfully, someone actually has done this, and recently.
Last year, Chris Gore, one of the people who were involved in the original cable network released an extensive documentary about G4, covering its beginnings in 2002 up until its end in 2012. by mainly focusing on its flagship series, Attack of the Show. This documentary is also interesting from the perspective that G4 itself represents the end of television itself as it is more or less the last original cable network to launch to any sort of success. In essence, it works as both a snapshot of a time and place, and the story of how an entire era of mass media ended.
It also presents a timeline of events in a specific era in pop culture from its beginnings to its endings by the time the network was shuttered. Even just starting with the last remnants of '90s style extreme design and font in its beginnings that slowly fell away to the big and bold '00s style of "edge" and degeneracy that was popular at the time, it represents the shift in tone very well. It's no wonder so many Millennials fondly remember the network--it encapsulates what the decade was like for those around at the time who lived through it.
I do recommend watching the above documentary if you are curious about what it was like back then, even if the time period was not your favorite. It shows exactly what people were interested in at the time and what exactly they wanted out of entertainment and their products. You can't look at G4 and not just see the 2000s in every facet of its existence. This is also why the network relaunch was always doomed to fail, because it was built around personalities that hated what the network was built on and the people who made it while forgetting that times have changed and the social climate is much different, and worse. Many such cases, unfortunately.
Even G4 itself never really recovered from Attack of the Show losing the last of their two original hosts in 2012, just before the network ended, a signal that the hangover that was the 2000s was really over and the 2010s were just ahead.
There's just no going back. That era is over.
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"G4 is to TV what the MCU is to movies." ~ Quote from the documentary |
As for my opinion on the network . . . it wasn't for me. I've never really liked corporate geek identity, and have always been puzzled by people who desire to live clichés others give to them. I hated that infamous 2010 Kevin Butler speech at E3 where he listed a bunch of stereotypes and declared this is what gamers were to thunderous applause. I loathed Big Bang Theory and its checkbox geekery, and I detest the idea of products and brand as a personality that was really embraced during that time period and fully flowered into the lifestyle brands of the 2010s.
All around, just a bad era culturally and socially, and it led to an even worse one in the decade after.
The documentary even tries to bring up the old canard that only geeks and nerds read comic books, played video games, and engaged in tabletop games back in the day, something that is a HEAVY revisionism of what it was actually like back then for those like me who lived through it. Everyone in my schoolyard, for instance, played a collected Magic: The Gathering and every single person in my class played video games. This was BEFORE the 2000s, and I keep being told that liking this stuff was some sort of taboo back then. This revisionism to make "geeks" a separate cohort that were bullied for the products they consumed is simply not the case.
What this sort of talk does is foster an ingroup outgroup dynamic based on half-truths that lead others to think they have to behave a certain way to be accepted into a club. This leads to today when you can look at any Geek Culture podcast or stream and be amazed that not only does everyone look and dress the same but they all have their apartments/rooms decorated in the exact same ways while they spout the exact same opinions on everything else.
G4 didn't cause this, to be fair, but it was the starting point for where a lot of this weird lifestyle brand attitude showed its early form.
It turned a hobby into an identity.
But that's not how it was back in the 20th century.
Fact of the matter is there were only two weird kids in my class growing up: one who awkwardly brought up wrestling all the time and another one who was an antisocial thug. The first was not weird because he liked wrestling, but because he had bizarre thought patterns no one understood. He was not hated or bullied over it, either. The second was a weirdo because he attended political protests and threw Molotov cocktails at government buildings. That dude was also a fedora and seethed to himself a lot. Needless to say, the second one was the only one the other kids outright disliked. Neither were considered odd because of corporate products they consumed, because even those people had an identity beyond entertainment media.
We had a guy in our class that installed emulators on the school computers and once printed out porn of a video game character and even he wasn't the target of bullying. Believe it or not, the world wasn't such a simplistic place where your interests defined your identify back then. It was how you treated other people and conducted yourself in public. Revenge of the Nerds is a deranged revenge fantasy of people who probably should have been stuffed into lockers. Even then, however, watching popular movies didn't make you part of a social class.
You are never going to convince me that the giant merchandizing blockbusters of Star Wars up to The Matrix were not enjoyed by normal people, because they were. Super Mario Bros. 3 was a multimillion seller and the NES one of the highest selling systems of all time--ever kid and teenager played them or knew what they were. X-Men comics used to sell around one million per issue and I knew a lot of people who read them. All of this stuff was normal. You were not weird for engaging in this stuff. Again, this was all before the 2000s before people were bringing Death Notes to class and Naruto-running in the hall in their porn hoodies. Take a guess as to what was actually different about the times. Hint: it was not the entertainment itself but the attitude behind those consuming it.
All that happened is that the brand overtook identity and consumed social interaction. It was no longer about things you like, but about things you obsess over to fill a spiritual vacuum in a way of putting Us Vs. Them.
But that is really what happened in the 2000s. All forms of real identity fell away and became little more than a question of what products you like, which then folded over into other groups trying to inject their poisonous new morality systems into this climate to lazily change the world through classroom theories made by people with no authority over anyone. Hence, the G4 network relaunch's failure. That era was transitional, to a time before the poison had set in, and there is no going back to a time before the audience had been tampered with.
The 2000s time period felt like a generation of people who gave up on any sense of identity or ambition beyond the products they consumed. This lead to a lack of perspective and a way for those in charge to have a way to press down on new morality systems to those who let their old beliefs fall away. Without any immune system, it was a perfect chance to revamp these people into what they wanted. Even with the network itself you can see it get strangled with more and more restrictions as time went on, eventually leading to the point that there was no way to retain its original identity. If you want to talk about the problems for or against gatekeeping, it's been an issue for a long time.
That said, Attack of the Doc! is an important documentary to watch if you want an idea of what it was generally like back then, or at the very least what a certain generation grew up with in their mass media. It might help understand exactly why the pop cult has such a hard grip on them today in a way older generations do not seen to quite be affected. And I would assume, any younger viewer might find the entire thing straight up bizarre. After all, television has never been relevant in their lifetimes, so seeing how it affected a whole generation of people might be difficult to process.
But that's just it. Television is over, and its affect from the Boomers up to the Millennials is pretty well fading. It's difficult to describe just how it has changed since the 2000s.
Much like when we talked about Nickelodeon and the like, there was a period of time that affected a lot of young people, one that is no longer around and will never return, and should be understood as such. At this point, the remnants of pop culture are more or less antiques of an old civilization that is currently being swept away by progress and the winds of change.
It is up to us to preserve what works and discard what doesn't, and now is the best time to do just that.
Have a good weekend and I'll see you next time!
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