THE HERALD
G4 offers odd look at pop culture
Bob Taylor
8/24/07

Here's something that caught me off guard while flipping channels this summer: I found myself watching a lot of G4, the one-time video-game channel that tried, with disastrous results, to remake itself as a destination for twenty-something guys a few years back.

Artifacts from that failure remain. For some reason, G4 continues to rerun episodes of "The Man Show" at night. Immature, syndicated garbage like "Cheaters" and "COPS" also remain inexplicably on the schedule. And just so you know, I will never forgive Comcast, which owns G4, for buying up the similarly themed but far superior TechTV and then canceling 95 percent of the programming that came with it. That wasn't a merger; it was an execution.

Despite all that, G4 has recently become a channel I instinctively flip to during the evening if I'm in the mood for some casual viewing. Airing at 6 p.m. is "Ninja Warrior," this crazy Japanese import where people run through three stages of super-intensive obstacle courses. If you ever watched Spike TV's "Most Extreme Elimination Challenge," it's quite similar to that. But "MXC," as it was abbreviated, was played for laughs and included jokey English overdubs that turned it into a parody of the Japanese-obstacle-course genre. (You didn't know that was a genre, did you? It is.)

"Warrior," however, is serious business with ridiculously tough challenges that are too taxing for all but the most gifted athletes to conquer. It's not even really a race, since only a few contestants are able to complete all three stages.

And you will occasionally see a recognizable American face braving the "Warrior" course. The other day, I watched Olympic gymnast Paul Hamm give it a shot. "Ninja Warrior" is great fun, so much so that some lucky American "Ninja" wannabe recently won a trip to ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Japan to compete as part of a contest thrown by the other good reason to watch G4 these days - "Attack of the Show."

"Show" is the channel's 7 p.m. news magazine that focuses on all things tech and pop culture. Hosts Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn, along with a group of regular contributors, spend an hour each day discussing the hottest cell phones, MP3 players, DVDs, video games and all the other stuff we geeks spend our hard-earned money on. Pereira is good natured and self-deprecating; Munn is cute and a little goofy. Together, they can somehow make a conversation about the new iPhone supremely entertaining.

Even better, G4 recently started expanding "Attack of the Show" for select events, offering live coverage of such pop-culture hotbeds as the San Diego ComicCon, the comic-book convention where movie studios hype their future blockbusters, and E3, the year's most important video-game expo. These special live broadcasts still need some work. Did the network really need to cut to commercial smack dab in the middle of E3 presentations from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony? 

 But for those of us who have only been able to follow these events in years past via Internet blogs, the G4 coverage was like being awarded an all-access pass to something you've only read about and never gotten to see before. 

 So maybe, just maybe, G4 is a network worth considering again. Two shows alone don't make a success story, and "Ninja Warrior" is a gimmicky series that might have a short life span in this country. (I have a feeling I'm going to be sick of it before too long.) 

 But if the network can create more shows like "Attack," which dive right into the parts of pop culture that the mainstream media usually ignores, G4 might be known as something other than the channel that killed TechTV.