[excerpt] Southern California was still wringing out its collective socks from a rash of heavy rains this week when we arrived.
It was time once more for TV critics to preview upcoming TV shows, and with more than 40 cable channels strutting their stuff in just four days, the scene reminded me a little of Midwestern weather: If I didn't like what I saw, all I had to do was wait 15 minutes.
So that meant not much time was wasted on G4, a tiny digital cable offering (Channel 216 on Time Warner Cable) that promotes itself as “video game television.”
The channel's recent makeover resulted in a new slogan — “Fast Cars, Faster Women” — and a program lineup that suggests a target viewer in his midteens who doesn't yet have his driver's license and spends his day playing violent video games populated by weirdly proportioned fantasy babes.
Take the new G4 show, “Girls Gone Wired” (with a debut in February), described as a “digital beauty pageant featuring the hottest 2-D and 3-D women on the planet.”
Two of the channel's “video game experts,” pasty-skinned types in their late 20s or early 30s, hyped the show for a few minutes. I leafed through a wall calendar filled with illustrations of the “contestants” — a jaw-dropping lineup that no sensible mom would allow the target viewer to watch.Read the entire article. "
