These days, every store imaginable is selling some sort of Avengers pop figure or Superman t-shirt. This is a result of geek culture becoming mainstream. It seems like every celebrity is into anime, video games or comic books. I believe one of the factors that led to this embrace of geek culture was the popular television show Attack of the Show.
For four to five days a week, Attack of the Show aired on G4 between 2005 and 2012. It started as a replacement for The Screen Savers, a show that aired on TechTV, a network which was purchased by G4. The show centered around pretty much all things related to geek culture. Comic books, movies, video games and television shows were just some of the nerdy topics covered. As time went on, the show began to cover more topics such as fashion, cars and cell phones.
Another topic covered by the show was internet videos. Sites such as YouTube and Break.com were home to viral internet videos in the 2000s. Each episode of Attack of the Show was kicked off with a segment covering these videos titled “Around the Net.” This segment featured many popular video types such as music videos, parodies and sketches. With the rise of social media in the 2010s, videos from Twitter and Facebook also became featured.
What made this segment along with the many others so good was the chemistry between the hosts. During its entire run, Attack of the Show featured 9 hosts. Each episode was co-hosted by 2 of the hosts. The most popular duo to co-host was Kevin Pereira and Olivia Munn. For most people, myself included, they are the first people who come to mind when thinking of the show. I think this is because of how many shows they did together and how many memorable moments they were a part of.
One of the show’s most famous moments was Munn and Pereira diving into a giant pie while wearing maid outfits, a moment which led to Munn breaking her ankle. The unscripted banter the two have in each of their episodes is hilarious and really shows their chemistry with each other. This made Munn’s decision to leave the show in 2010 very disheartening. It felt like something was missing without out for a while but eventually co-hosts Candace Bailey, Alison Haislip and Sara Underwood stepped up to the plate and became good replacements.
Two years after Munn left, Pereira did as well. Without him, the show was truly never the same and it was cancelled in 2013, the same year the G4 network pretty much died. As a kid, I didn’t watch much of Attack of the Show because I didn’t really care for it but I’ve been spending time during this pandemic watching older episodes on YouTube and I appreciate it a lot more now. One reason being how the show was able to seamlessly switch between sex jokes and reviews of the newest smartphones.
I don’t think I’ve seen a show do as good of a job of mixing so many different news topics together. With news of G4 returning in some for this year, I am hopeful that Attack of the Show is one of the shows that is rebooted. It would be great to have a show with entertaining hosts tackling interesting topics in this day and age.
Episodes of Attack of the Show can be found on YouTube or The Internet Archive.
By Brendan Bell