‘The Screen Savers’ is one of the most important shows for both Tech TV and G4.
Originally hosted by Leo Laporte and Kate Botello, and in the later years by Patrick Norton, ‘The Screen Savers’ was a daily show centered on computers, new technologies, and their adaptations in the world. If you consider yourself a nerd in the early 2000s, you were most likely the target demo for the show.
The show was a launching pad for some of Tech TV’s most noticeable on-air talent such as Morgan Webb, Martin Sargent, and Chris Pirillo. The merger of G4 and TechTV was the downfall for the show as Leo Laporte left soon after and Comcast fired the San Francisco crew while moving the show to Los Angeles.
The OG Screensavers was the most influential show that was produced by the networks and highlighted the rise or fall of both. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the legacy G4, back in the mid-2000s, G4 was a gaming network largely carried by its flagship show Attack of the Show! and X-Play.
You may have heard the name Chris Gore mentioned with G4, he was the guy who did ‘DVDuesday’ a weekly segment on ‘Attack of the Show’ where he will promote the best in the selections of films you can think of.
Gore also had a very important role in Attack of the Show which was the biggest show on the network for G4. Attack of the Show had a massive cultural impact in the late 2000s with people in the nerd community. Attack of the Show was one of the first outlets that showcased pop culture events such as E3, Comic Con, and CES.
The show at its peak was survived by Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn, whose chemistry made the show work with G4’s Niche audience. ‘Attack the Doc’ is a documentary that focuses on the rise in the fall of G4 most popular program from the perspective of the people who are closest to the show.
The documentary is a solid blast from the past for people who want to remember G4 back when the network was respectable. It certainly wasn’t all good times as a lot of the content on the show was very dated for the time.
Despite multiple efforts to recreate what they had back in 2008, the documentary shows that G4 can only strike lightning in a bottle once. As quick as the rise of G4 was the downfall was quicker once the corporate overlords at Comcast decided that the network was no longer attractive enough towards its preferred target audience.
While G4 relied heavily on X-Play and Attack Of The Show to pull itself into mainstream relevance in the late 2000s, it was the lack of quality programming that was the downfall of the network in 2013. Some may consider their peak to be 2008 but the diversity of content under the G4TechTV was the absolute zenith of what G4 as a network had to offer.
Chris Gore spend a lot of time in years putting this thing together and ‘Attack of the Doc’ is a great recant of the G4 years that many fans of the network will surely enjoy.
How did Comcast (NBC Universal) screw this up?
3.5/5
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