Thing is, no one in that demographic really watches TV anymore. They watch it all online. I mean, this kinda make me sad because the network I used to love is now completely gone, but it’s not like I was watching any of it. What I did catch of it, I watched online.
The only thing that makes me actually sad is missing the final episode of AOTS, since actually paying attention to their predecessor is an awesome idea.
Oh, and Sessler definitely parted with them on bad terms, based on what I’ve heard.
As someone currently working for G4, but who can’t really say much about what’s going to happen (you’ll notice all the announcements say “sources say”, but there has been no official announcement from anyone), I will say… yup. This is the answer to the OPs question.
Yeah, I suppose this makes sense. It took longer than newspapers or magazines, but I guess for tech people even basic cable network TV is now considered part of ‘old media’…
I don’t know what magazine you’re thinking of. The only similarities between Esquire and Playboy are that at one time they were known for men’s lifestyle coverage and high quality literary content --no joke – fiction, essays, long-form journalism. At some point, Esquire and GQ got the reputation for catering to gay readers. Neither Esquire nor GQ were soft core porn nor targeting black readership so far as I know. The New Yorker was kind of in that group too but went in a more intellectual, rather than fashion and lifestyle.
How about we have a “COPS Reruns Channel” and all the other channels can air something else that actually fits their alleged brand. I wonder how long until the Weather Channel rebrands itself as “TWC” and starts showing COPS.
The earliest (and one of the few) mentions of it I can remember was when I saw an old Honeymooners rerun in the 70s. Ralph & Norton are at the barbers and while waiting Norton picks up a magazine and says, “Hey Ralph, Esquire! Va-Va-Va-Voom!” I figured it had to have been risqué back then. Not sure why I thought it was a black magazine in the 70s, maybe confusing it with Essence…
Esquire and GQ have both been known to slip a few naked boobies into their pages every now and again. It’s not nude spreads like Playboy, but a naked chest isn’t uncommon.
I don’t recall having seen nipples in those magazines but even if it happens on a rare occasions, I wouldn’t call it soft core porn because it’s not marketed as such and it’s not well enough known that adolescents will clamor for an issue hoping to catch some nudity. It would be like calling the Sears catalogue soft core porn.
You can see more nipples in a high-end women’s fashion magazine than you can in Esquire, and this has been true for a long time. In fact, the women’s magazines did a lot of nudity in the 90s and then started cutting it back as America became increasingly puritan after the rise of the Moral Majority and other groups. Esquire followed the same path. The lad’s magazines - Maxim, FM, and all their British competitors - never did nipples at all, AFAIK. This always baffled me but they somehow branded themselves as a counter to the Internet and it worked, at least until it stopped working and most of them went out of business.
If you want to know why Esquire got a reputation as soft-core as far back as the 1930s, it was almost entirely because of the Vargas Girls. All cartoons, and almost no nipples but definitely NSFW so the link goes into a spoiler box.
I’d say there were nothing like them, but that’s misleading. *Everybody *copied them, but nobody got close. Vargas moved over to Playboy in the 1950s and did the same girls with less clothing. But Esquire literally became the best magazine of the 60s.
And the answer to why G4 is going under is simple. It has had a reputation - since 2006! - of being the lowest-rated basic cable channel. OK, at some points it climbed as high as “one of the lowest-rated” but that butters no parsnips, to use the oldest and lowest-tech expression I can think of.
The men’s magazines are thick with ads, so they hope to transfer that ad money to cable. My magic 8 ball is cloudy so I can’t tell if it will work. But even if it becomes the lowest-rated basic cable channel, it’s still break-even.
Keira Knightley’s nipples first appeared in public in the pages of Esquire. I was always surprised this issue was never stolen from the library I work at.
There was more nudity in the 1990s. Then everybody started cutting back. By the 2000s nipples became rare and by today - 2013 - they are essentially nonexistent in men’s magazines. A magazine generation is about 4 years, as a rule of thumb, so those are separate eras.
Sure, though not as many anymore, but that’s only because using the term evokes a “2003 (or is it 1998?) called, it wants its buzzword back” reaction.
One does wonder why when seeking a pithy hip word to refer to what used to be just “A Refined, Elegant Gentleman” we came up with something that sounds like a paraphilia towards rapid transit trains…
That’s the thing, ‘metrosexual’ was/is such a made-up, artificial, inconsequential, trendy hipster phrase. As I remember it, it was created/popularized by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (though it never came close to being a mainstream term) and like I said pretty much peaked when it got parodied by South Park:
Mister Garrison: “Those pants and those shoes say you pound butt!”
Uncle Jimbo: “Wait, my pants don’t say I pound butt.”
Mister Garrison: “No, your pants say you take it in the butt!!”
Must rise in defense: QESG was the media’s most visible act of cashing in on the “metrosexuality” fad, not the originator. Like they used to say, by the time some trend makes it to the cover of TIME, it means it’s old news.
I’m grateful for the COPS reruns. We can record them and play them back on Saturday nights during the regular time slot when the local Fox affiliate has preempted COPS to show UFC bouts and NASCAR races (which is almost always).