icons

This show is G4's great answer to other networks biography shows like "Bio" and "E! True Hollywood Stories" and what G4's seems to have modeled this show after, "Intimate Portrait". This show represents the best and worst aspects of G4. Best because it shows the channel does have the potential to do some intelligent, and informative programming. The episodes are mostly great and even the most hardcore G4 haters will give the show lots of love. In fact, for many it's because of G4 not wanting to do anything else as intelligent as Icons that many lash out at the channel and it's other shows. It represents the worst of G4 because even though the show is almost always well meaning, alot of G4's greed, ignorance, and personal politics manage to slip through and rear it's ugly head. Probably the earliest example of this was when the show was first getting started and doing great with viewers until G4 started abusing the shows name declaring all kinds of new, crappy games that which some weren't even out, Icons. The first was the infamous TLOR scandal where they declared a crappy new game based on the license an Icons before it was even out. Then they did Splinter Cell and Xbox Icons, but again, this was way before Splinter Cell was what we all know today, all these we're really just infomercials not histories. People on the boards we're pissed and it seemed like G4 got the point and gave the sleazy crap a rest. Once again though, the nonsense continued with more fake Icon infomercials about Hunter, Tron, and Onimusha and again people bitched and the nonsense stopped for a while. As if the whoring wasn't enough, the show then and now, hardly ever got any updates and even the reruns we're hardly ever on compared to the other shows. To make it even worse, G4 insisted on an incredibly unfulfilling, and really downright disrespectful half-hour timeslot considering just how important and influential the subjects they cover are. Still, the show trudged on and kept releasing good eps here and there. Although again more letdowns, probably one of the absolute worst was when what probably should have been one of the most important Icons ever, Id, became nothing but a cheap promo for Doom III. The problem with these episodes is the staff that makes Icons also does another show called "Gamemaker Specials" which is a dedicated game infomercial show. This should be great for everyone, but the problem is some of the powers that be force the staff to let both shows just "happen" to overlap with one another from time to time. Now, here's the bad. The show of recent has totally been changed for the most part to make it as casual as can be. Before there used to a nice variety of subjects, but now it seems like the suits upstairs pressure the Icons staff to only do subjects that will lead up to a new title they can make money promoting which makes hoping for any classic franchises getting covered slim to none. On average, there's probably about one real Icons each season, the rest is marketing.