High Stakes Poker: Season 1 vs. Season 4

[FoldALot.]

Personally, I find most episodes from Season 1 much more entertaining than the new ones. I'm trying to figure out why that is.

I believe the main reason is that the actual play appeared to be less random back then. In the other thread it was said that HSP has no instructional value at all, but I disagree. I learned a lot from those early episodes. Not necessarily about perfect cash game play, but about what makes these old-school pros great and how differently they play the game.
You had Negreanu playing with a million and trying to dominate the table, and his impressive reads.
You had Farha, extremely aggressive but sensing weakness perfectly, with a bit of crazy gambling mixed in.
You had Greenstein with his Barry-play, a subtle play that would go totally unnoticed in the current line-up because players are busy chatting about inane stuff.
You had Forrest, the Brunsons, Harman, Deeb, Esfandiari.
None of these made any huge blunders. At the very least you always got an idea about their thought processes.
And this goes for the amateurs as well. You had Dr. Nasseri who made some good aggressive play. With Buss and Chamanara the difference between them and the pros became very apparent. Still, their decisions made sense for their style of play.
Compare that to the new episodes where you have a hard time figuring out what the playing are doing and why.

It probably has a lot to do with HSP's success. Back when the show started no one involved knew whether anyone would watch the show. All they offered were some well-known pros playing cash-game. But it worked. The game play alone made good television.
Nowadays all players are all too well aware of their status, and their huge egos are on display all the time, trying to make TV time.
In the old episodes there was much less ego but way more class. I like that a lot better. It still had the feel of an actual cash-game being taped, not a TV-show involving some poker.

I could go on but will leave it at that for now. Will keep watching of course.

[Hotel Detect]

I love HSP. The only season that I have disliked so far was season 3. The first 80% of that season was unbearable because of the lack of action, ... now people complain about too much action in season 4. Oh well, Ill take it over Shak, Harmetz, and Trincher (lol) any day.

[Rottersod]

I'm lost this season. Nothing is making any sense and there seems to be no particular style of play that is entertaining. The pots have become so big, so fast that I can't relate to them. An example of this is Gold's A2 bluff against Farha's Q7. After the flop betting it was checked down but there was still over 100K in the pot. How the hell did that happen? In past seasons we would have seen a pot of about $30-40k. How big of a donk do you have to be to bluff/check/check $50k? And does that make great TV?

[Dromar]

OP, I agree completely.