Thursday, February 15, 2007

The 1/2 Hour News Hour

Hal Boedeker wrote in Orlando Sentinel Fox News Channel bombs with comedy show

How do you know. It has not aired yet.
Jon Stewart knows how to do slashing comical commentary.
He is a liberal, and takes shots at conservatives, and Hal thinks that is funny.
He weighs in on what's happening, such as the media's bizarre coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death.
Gee, what we need. More coverage of Ana Nicole Smith. However Fox is covering it too.
David Letterman knows how to do slashing comical commentary.
He is a liberal, and takes shots at conservatives, and Hal thinks that is funny.
He takes President Bush's awkward speeches and contrasts them with the lasting words of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
How about the lasting words of Ronald Reagan? Oh, yes, you are a liberal, and don't want to admit that Reagan did anything good.
Fox News Channel does not know how to do slashing comical commentary. The channel debuts
I.E. it has not aired yet, and already Hal is panning it.
"The 1/2 Hour News Hour" at 10 p.m. Sunday and repeats it at 10 p.m. Feb. 25. This show was meant to be a conservative version of "The Daily Show." It is a botch.
It will allow conservatives to laugh at liberals.
"The 1/2 Hour News Hour" does not comment on what is happening; it simply takes swipes at people.
And I suspect what those people are doing.
These people include Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Ed Begley Jr. Other joke topics are the ACLU, Time magazine, children's books and global warming. Laughter, of an awfully canned variety, greets all the gags. Nothing happening on screen justifies these outbursts. Hey, I'm all for a good dig at the high and the mighty.
Particularly if they are conservatives
But these satirists fall short of hitting their targets with wit, timeliness or punch. Which raises the point: What is a comedy show doing on a news channel?
What is a pretend news show doing on the Comedy Channel.
"The 1/2 Hour News Hour" was developed by Joel Surnow, who has given the world many minutes of entertainment through "24." On the basis of the premiere, Surnow should stick to political thrillers. At the top, Rush Limbaugh puts in a cameo as the U.S. president (the year is 2009); Ann Coulter drops in as his vice president. Then they disappear, a smart move. Fox News Channel will offer a second episode at 10 p.m. March 4. If we're lucky, we'll never hear of this dreadful show again.
If you don't like it, don't watch. I don't watch the Daily Show or David Letterman

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great commentary, Don! I am excited about Fox News' comedy show and hope people will start taking conservative comedy seriously. A politically incorrect site called ourcountry.com is doing similar stuff.

Anonymous said...

The problem with this show is that it only mocks liberals on a network that is supposed to be fair and balanced. The Colbert Report and the Daily Show mock liberals, independents, conservatives and wackos of all kind.

But a show that's based on comedy has it's destinys usually determined by the quality of it's comedy, not its slant or the sense of humor of its intended constituency.

Don Singleton said...

The problem with this show is that it only mocks liberals on a network that is supposed to be fair and balanced.

If there was more than one news outlet that was fair and balanced, and even gave the conservative side a fair shake, I might agree with you, but the poor libs have NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR and all we have is Fox News.

The Colbert Report and the Daily Show mock liberals, independents, conservatives and wackos of all kind.

But they hit conservatives much more frequenty than liberals.

But a show that's based on comedy has it's destinys usually determined by the quality of it's comedy, not its slant or the sense of humor of its intended constituency.

Then why do the other comedy shows hit conservatives the hardest.

Anonymous said...

Since the show hasn't aired yet, I don't believe we can say for certain that the Fox News comedy show will only throw punches at liberals.

Anonymous said...

"Gee, what we need. More coverage of Ana Nicole Smith. However Fox is covering it too."

Actually, if you watch TDS, they were mostly commenting on how ridiculous the coverage by all the news networks was. They specifically sent almost all of their jokes at CNN, because they were showing pictures of Smith's "Possible Death Fridge". ALL of the news outlets are moronic, and make easy targets for TDS.