To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.

A year ago last summer, my cable box was broken. Turns out that Adelphia decided to switch my neck of the woods over to digital cable, and that I needed exchange the old analog box for a shiny new digital one. For the next three days, I had something like 150 channels at my disposal, including every flavor of HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, and Starz. Every single one. East coast feeds. West coast feeds. HBO Comedy. Sixty crazy music channels with no picture other than album and artist info. Eventually, they put the premium channel filters in place and many of those channels went away. But I still had over 100 channels from which to choose.

It was nuts. After a year of watching pretty much nothing but The Learning Channel, Sci-Fi Channel, and VH1 Classic, (I am first and foremost a proponent of a la carté cable lineups) I eventually found TechTV. TechTV was a San Francisco-based cable station that was doing some really interesting stuff about technology. Namely, they were talking about it. No other channel would even mention anti-spyware software existed, let alone compare various apps and make a recommendation. The crown jewel of TechTV was a show called The Screen Savers, and it had a sort of cult following for a couple years before I ever found it. If I recall correctly, TSS was the place where Steve "The Woz" Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers, gave a PowerBook to convicted uber-hacker Kevin Mitnick live on air on the day Mitnick's probation ended. That show must have rocked. I hadn't started tuning in yet.

I immediately took a liking to The Screen Savers, because this was the show where intelligent people clearly displayed a passion for technology. You could tell the entire staff read Slashdot, by choice, and had for a long long time. This was a show designed for me. I may not care about segments involved hacking an Xbox, but it was a neat show that gave out quickie pointers to useful freeware and Firefox extensions. The cast and crew of TSS really, truly supported Firefox. I loved them for that.

In July, the channel was purchased by gaming channel G4 of Los Angeles. The G4 executives flew out to San Francisco and met the TechTV staff. They shook hands. Probably had lunch together. Got a full tour of the TechTV offices.

Three days later, G4 issued about 125 pink slips. One for each and every TechTV employee. Every single one. "You're all fired," was the order from L.A. "Some of you will be invited to reapply for your current positions if we decide to keep your particular program on air. Moving to L.A. will be mandatory. Otherwise, have a nice life." In September, G4TechTV started airing new episodes of some of its existing series: TSS was definitely on there, as was existing TechTV gaming show X Play, and an odd duckling simply called Unscrewed. Unscrewed was a really addictive show that, as near as I can tell, loosely followed a talk show format and starred Martin Sargent. Imagine Late Night with Conan O'Brien if it was half as long, replaced the live band with an open bar, used the same guests as talk radio conspiracy nut Art Bell, and Conan had an obvious learning disorder and/or chemical dependency. It was neat, and dare I say it, funny.

TSS co-host Patrick Norton was absent. He decided to stay in S.F. with his new wife. They instead got a zany youngster to co-host: Alex Albrecht. Alex was a cross between that hip uncle you like and can't believe is related to your mom and the hip younger cousin you just can't stand to be around. The show had a different flavor to it, but I gave it a chance. It still stayed programmed into my cable box to switch to channel 129 every weeknight at 7 PM.

Two months after Alex's debut, he was fired along with most everyone else on the show, including a lot of people who pulled up stakes and moved to L.A. back in August. Only two people were kept on staff: eternal boy-man Kevin Rose and his real-life girlfriend Sarah Lane. Plenty of other people on other series also got the boot, including Martin Sargent and, of course, everyone else associated with his show.

Two week after that, TSS came back with new faces and a new format. They were voraciously going after the junior-high school male gamer demographic. Boys ages 12 to 15, and, really, not much else. Instead of talking about technology, they were talking about neat gizmos that you can buy. The show had already ceased to be product reviews and instead became more like product demos, but this was sick. On TechTV, Yoshi the case modding guru would spend $40,000 on a laser-guided metal cutter to make professional case mods out of metal, wood, and even ceramics. He was an artist and the computer case was his medium. He was fired after two months of doing awkward and obviously forced segments on cheap mods. I mean really cheap. Things a kid could do for under $15? Yeah, exactly. He wasn't even designing whole cases anymore. He was doing small parts and pieces of vague, generic mods well beneath his talent. Nothing fancy. The kind of thing a teenager could get his mitts on. Now they have a regular segment devoted to new DVD releases and special features they contain. They don't interview leaders in the field of design and artificial intelligence anymore. Now they interview rock stars and teen actors from forgettable shows on the WB. They rather talk to Bam Margera than Bram Cohen anymore.

Today, I discovered the channel has plans to incorporate musical guests onto TSS on Fridays. And every piece of news I find about the channel points irrevocably to one thing: the channel is going out of business and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Former TechTV mainstay Leo Laporte has a regular AM radio segment on some station no one really listens to, and if you search the web carefully you'll find an MP3 of his thoughts on G4 ruining their own livelihood. His basic idea is that the channel is not being run correctly, and a bunch of ignorant suits are swinging at air. I believe the phrase "swan song" was used. And, without a hint of animosity in his voice for the company that gave him a big fat middle finger and booted his butt off to Canadian TV and American radio, he predicted that the channel was circling the drain and had a remaining lifespan measured in months. If anything, he sounded sad. Not sad for G4, but for all of the close friends who got jerked around by G4 in the process, and who are all now just biding time until they need to go looking for another job. Leo's doing fine. His kids aren't going hungry. Patrick Norton, I hear, is doing well freelancing columns for various magazines and technical publications. Tomorrow, it turns out, really is another day. When Sideshow Bob threatened Springfield to eliminate television or face nuclear annihilation, anchorman Kent Brockman reminded people to keep up with his new column "Making the Most of Your Modem". Nowadays, people have blogs instead. I keep tabs on former TechTV personalities through their blogs, and they all seem to be doing OK. They all seem to agree that what G4 has done is tragic. I believe Leo summed it up as "That's business. No offense; it happens all the time." I'd append "whether it should or not" to that.

What upsets me about all this is that the viewers who loved TechTV now have nothing to fall back on. I'd rate the current TSS as "unwatchable". There is no other show on TV like TSS was. I hold onto hope that the rumors of a Microsoft-funded "TechTV 2"-like channel really is in the works, but I doubt that former G4TechTV employees are being groomed to make the leap once G4 finally goes down in flames. I feel bad, because it used to be something really great, and now it's been commoditized by suits into the typical drivel you'd expect to find on another pathetic high-numbered cable channel. Like MTV2.