So, here I am, on Saturday, taking a break from playing Half-Life 2 and reading the "last week" page of FARK, when what do I find? A report on Alex Albrecht's blog that almost all of the cast of The Screen Savers had been let go, and had been replaced by new people from G4. If the morons at G4 (I cannot think of it having anything left of TechTV anymore) think that changing hosts AGAIN is going to save the show, they are sorely mistaken. I cannot imagine what they think their target audience is, but they are steadily losing all of their previous viewer base. I enjoyed watching ZDTV, back in the day -- that was where I found The Screen Savers -- even though my wife is not crazy about the show, I sometimes watched it anyway (i.e. I got the remote before she did). When Ziff-Davis sold the network, there were changes. Some were good, some not. They lost most of the ZD magazine columnists as commentators, but the core survived. The lineup evolved, as did TSS. G4 has had, in my opinion, a pretty weak lineup for a long time. They seem to focus on things that the latest "MTV Generation" might find entertaining, but are only peripherally related to computer and video gaming. Their best shows were a game review show (produced by one of the stars), a show focusing on the intro/promo/cut-scene video/animation in games and Arena -- a competition between two teams in a variety of computer and video games hosted by a pair of wise-cracking commentators that gave their own humorous blow-by-blow (almost a gaming MST3K). G4 entered my sh-- list when one of the commentators on Arena, TV's Wil Wheaton, left the show in disgust. So, when I heard that G4 and TechTV were "merging" (with the subtext of TTV merging into G4), I had a bad feeling. TechTV was the better network, why wasn't it happening the other way around? My fears were somewhat allayed upon hearing that TSS was still on the schedule of the merged network. Then they failed to retain Leo Laporte's services for the show (and by all accounts that I read, it was because the G4 people were being A----les). Followed by Patrick Norton. This left only the younger members of the cast. Maybe its an L.A. thing, since this happened at the same time that they moved out of the TTV studios in San Francisco to the G4 studios in L.A.. They brought in a new guy (the aforementioned Alex) to shore up the cast, but they only gave him two months before the axe fell. It should be noted at this point that I hold no resentment for any of the past or present cast of TSS -- I know only their on-screen personas, and I figure that they are only doing their jobs, without any malice of forethought. It is the management of the network for which I have no respect. Their actions seem to mark them as classic "Hollywood business types" -- the same type of people who take a good idea and ruin it with their own "vision" because they just do not get it, and are too arrogant to listen to what the fans want. These are the same type of people who take a classic comic book character and change their origins and attitudes for a movie version, they "re-imagine" the character -- as if the original creator's vision was not good enough. I will probably occasionally look in on the "new" TSS, but I will not support it, nor will I frequent their advertisers (unless I frequent them already, in which case I will attempt to inform them as to the error of their advertising choices).