No, The 1/2 Hour News Hour doesn’t count as dazzling, deathless television but if it fails — particurly after the collapse of the Dennis Miller Show — it will be a long, long time before right-wingers get another shot at entertaining our own troops via TV and demonstrating that conservatives do, after all, possess a sense of humor. ~Michael Medved

I love that bit where he says, “especially after the collapse of the Dennis Miller Show.”  As if that painful experience were something that anyone would want to remember!  What does this new show seem to have in common with Dennis Miller’s act?  It’s pompous and it isn’t terribly funny.  Fortunately, the nation has at least been spared Joel Surnow’s brand of comedy on Monday Night Football.  He talks of it as if this were the last chance for conservatives to ever have their own comedy show, when I’m fairly sure the Murdoch empire would be only too glad to keep trying to come up with a formula that doesn’t peel the paint off of walls.      

You can almost feel Medved suffering as he writes this sorry apologia for what appears to be some of the worst television FoxNews has produced since, well…probably since their last program aired earlier tonight.  Consider these clips and this promo as evidence of cruelty to viewers–if you dare to watch them in their entirety.  It is really too easy to knock the show as an elaborate version of the kind of torture Jack Bauer might use on suspected terrorists (the upside is that it might be more effective in gaining information than inflicting physical pain), but what could Joel Surnow expect when he tried his hand at comedy if not jokes about torturing the audience?

What is it that drives some conservatives to want to imitate things like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?  I suppose I understand the desire to have a popular and entertaining medium that caters to your side of the political street, but it seems to me that it’s an odd response to the success of your political rivals.  First of all, it completely misses that the two shows are capable of mocking the pretensions of most kinds of people, and they are not simply focused on their political enemies.  To the extent that they do focus on the administration and the GOP, you have to admit that these have proved to be rich targets for comedians of all stripes, just as Clinton was in the ’90s.  It also misses the reality that the shows rely heavily on the talent of their hosts–the format of fake news/fake talk does not necessarily make for great television.  Those of us who remember the Craig Kilborn era of The Daily Show understand the difference that Stewart made to the quality of the show.  Those of us who saw the early days of Colbert’s effort remember cringing at some of his weaker efforts–and even those weak shows were much better than any clip of this new show that I’ve seen.   

Producing this new show is the act of someone who can perceive the outward form of someone else’s success and thinks that if he starts dressing like the other person, takes up the same hobbies and begins going to the same social gatherings that he, too, will be as successful.  This conservative mimicry of left-leaning pop culture successes is a bit like Ottoman programs of Westernisation: they are completely artificial adaptations of the merely external products of another culture, one that the imitator does not even attempt to really understand.  All the mimic knows is that the other guy seems to be popular, successful or powerful and he wants to receive the same accolades and rewards.  So, shave your beards, wear European fashions and put your soldiers in Western uniforms as you teach them to march like Prussians, and you will finally stop losing wars to the Europeans!  How did that work out? 

One way that you can be sure that the creators of the new show don’t get the appeal of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report–which extends far beyond a purely left-liberal audience–is the way in which the “anchors” on the new show project the kind of appalling smugness that Colbert projects as part of his riff on…FoxNews talk show hosts.  Even in their “satire,” the people at FoxNews apparently can’t help but take themselves way too seriously, thereby playing directly into the hands of Colbert’s persona of the right-wing blowhard host.  Then they take the perfect subject for satire–Barack Obama–and somehow manage to miss the target.  On top of it all, they have laugh tracks–laugh tracks on a satire show!