Sunday, February 18, 2007

Fox's "1/2 Hour News Hour"

... is shaping up to be to Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" what Air America is to Rush Limbaugh.

"The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is not a right-of-center comedy show. It's more like some not very clever left-wing blogger's mean-spirited parody of a right-of-center comedy show: "These right-wingers are so clueless that they would think it funny that Barack Obama's initials are BO."

What a minute ... maybe that's exactly what "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" really is! Maybe it's some ultra-Colbertian exercise in meta-irony: a parody within a parody within a parody. "Hey you conservative clods - we think you are are so stupid that this is the kind of cold-stone-dead junk you'd laugh at."

Seriously: "The 1/2 Hour News Hour" is so unfunny as to be affirmatively insulting. Do the programmers at Fox really think that we their viewers are this dumb?

Happily, the show is also completely unnecessary There is already a conservative alternative on the air on Sunday nights: HBO's Rome - a series that has probably done more to stimulate classical studies than anything since Gibbon's decision to leave his dirtiest footnotes in the original Latin.

02/18 10:53 PM