Arresting Entertainment, Part 3

Attention, nerds and geeks:
This woman will not date you.

Hello! This the third and probably final part of what has turned into a trilogy of blog posts about COPS, the fact that it runs ad infinitum on the G4 channel, and the other shows on G4. In this post I'll be discussing some of my observations about the channel in general.

From what I've gathered by scanning its Wikipedia page, G4 launched about nine years ago with several shows about video games. That kind of programming appeals to a particular kind of demographic. What I've also noticed about G4, thanks to a steady diet of COPS/Campus PD/Cheaters, is that a lot of its shows are hosted or co-hosted by very attractive women.

And therein is the con. Picture the typical gamer, someone who spends most of his waking hours (and hours a normal person wouldn't be awake) trying to complete Halo 2 or Final Fantasy Infinity, and you picture a guy with questionable hygiene whose forwarding address is Mom's Basement, USA. This is a generalization, yes, but there is a great deal of reality to it, about which I'll explain later.

G4's female-hiring decision is very smart, because...


SHE'S NOT MY FINAL FANTASY, BUT NOT MY FIRST FANTASY, EITHER
...it gives the gamer we pictured above, along with the teen boy who probably has yet to date a live girl, something that wasn't given to me when I was the age of the teen boy who had yet to date a live girl: hope, much of it false.

To be honest, I wasn't one who actively ogled the girls of swimsuit calendars and hair-band videos. I did find attractive women, well, attractive, but I didn't drool over them like some of my friends, who resembled the horny wolf in the old Tex Avery cartoons. I remember watching MTV at my friend Cal's house (a luxury because my parents didn't have cable, something I'll bitch-blog about in the future) with another friend, Brad — we were probably 15 — and when we started watching this video:

...the two of them not only knew the timing of every Tawny Kitaen gesture better than the video's choreographer, they also dissected her parts like they were describing the cars she was writhing on, and comparing her with other hotties of the day like Elle Macpherson and Paulina whateverhernameis.

"I think I'd rather date Elle," Brad would say, Brad and "Elle" enjoying first-name familiarity.

"I don't know," Cal would reply, "I think Elle's front teeth are a little too big."

Hey, hey Paula, I wanna
marry your partner.

And this conversation would go on and on and on. And this was a conversation that took place all over America. And these kinds of conversations were, for the most part, harmless. Guys like Brad and Cal knew that they had absolutely no chance of hooking up with a supermodel, or even an above-average-looking television personality, like, say, Carole Demas, aka the hotter of the two singers on The Magic Garden. Even if they won some kind of only-in-an-80s-comedy-that-would-star-John-Cusack radio contest where they won a date with Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington, what the hell would they even talk about? Skiing in Aspen? Doing blow of Stephanie Seymou's coccyx with JFK Junior?

A LITTLE PERSONAL HISTORY BEFORE I CONTINUE RIPPING ON THESE GEEKS AND NERDS
Before you claim that I'm some kind of egghead elitist, which I am, I should note some of my own gaming credentials. I've played video games most of my life, and spent most of 2006 playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and spend many moments with kids playing the Wii that would be otherwise wasted by reading to them. I also worked for Pokemon (and got hooked on their games) for a year and a half. I just don't have the time or the money (a PS3 is somewhere on my list of Things I Really Want But We Need To Save Up For A New Muffler For The Car First) to play every hot game when it's released.

WELL PLAYED, G4...WELL PLAYED

She will not
return your calls.

G4 knows what it's doing by hiring very attractive women, like Sara Underwood, the blond at the top of this post who has that girl-next-door look if your next-door neighbor was also Playboy's Playmate of the Month for July 2006 and I know this only because I read her Wikipedia page not because I have that issue hidden in my sock drawer in a manila envelope marked Boring Dull Paperwork Stuff And Prostate Test Results. Women like Underwood, along with the other G4 women who don't appear in Playboy but who all seem to appear on the cover of Stuff magazine at one time or another, make guys think they could have a chance with them.

After all, these women claim to have an interest in video games and other guy/lad topics. (Perhaps Sara Underwood does have an interest in gadgets and smartphones and gaming, but I doubt those subjects came up during her interview with the irradiated corpse that is Hugh Hefner.) Do you think Elle Macpherson would even know how to turn on an Xbox? Can Paulina Whatsherface even spell "PS3"? The G4 women present this down-to-earth image so a guy will think, "All I have to do is tell this hottie the secret cheat code to [whatever game is hot right now; I'm too lazy to research], and I'm friggin' in!" Granted, there are females who play video games, but few of them look like Sara Underwood.

YOU HAVE A FACE FOR RADIO LOW-RESOLUTION WEBCAMS

They don't even know you exist.

My earlier conclusion about the appearance of the typical gamer was culled from a G4 promo where one of the attractive women asked a question that viewers were invited to answer via webcam. The question in question was something like, "What video game have you played for so long that you didn't realize how long you were playing it?"

The series of video responses the channel chose to display revealed a motley assortment of goons that could trace part of their ancestry to featured extras from Tod Browning's Freaks. One guy, whose large, fleshy, bearded face filled the entire screen like a fist stuck in a tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Lard, elucidated at length about how he played some game (I don't remember which, like that even makes a difference) for so long that before he knew it, it was the next morning and he had forgotten to eat; I believed the former but not the latter.

And this was one of the video responses that made the cut!

THIS ONE'S FOR THE LADIES
I worry for the female gamer. She might not look like a Playboy playmate — she might look like you or me. (Well, hopefully not me, for her sake.) And she might express interest in a fellow gamer. And in a normal world, the gamer would realize that he's lucky that anyone with a pulse instead of might be interested in him. But thanks to G4, he's going to hold out for Sara Underwood. And that will be a wait much longer than the amount of time that ogre in the previous paragraph spent gaming.