Fox News to begin airing conservative Daily Show counterpart

[Miss Modular]

http://www.velvetrope.com/ubbthreads...e=0#Post928210

FNC takes satire out for spin
Network to air two Surnow pilots
By MICHAEL LEARMONTH

Fox News Channel is airing two pilots of Joel Surnow's "The ½ Hour News Hour" to test the market for a right-leaning satire show.
FNC is testing the concept on Sunday nights. The first episode will air at 10 p.m. Sunday and repeat the following Sunday. The second episode will air at the same time March 4.

The show, which stars comedians Kurt Long and Jenn Robertson, owes quite a bit to "Saturday Night Live" segment "Weekend Update" in both format and spirit. The "newscasters" will take a story of the day and then spin it to a comedic extreme.

"We're calling it news with a sense of humor," said Surnow, producer of Fox's "24." "It's a show that satirizes the targets that have been missed by the mainstream satirists on TV."

One seg discusses the timeless popularity on campus of T-shirts bearing the iconic image of Che Guevara. "We spin it into a campus T-shirt salesman who also sells T-shirts of Mao and Hitler," said co-producer Manny Coto.

FNC will promote the show over the next few weeks and see what kind of ratings it produces in a typically sleepy timeslot for cable news. Ratings will determine whether the show is picked up.

Surnow, a personal friend of Rush Limbaugh, said he hopes to get some promotion for the skein on conservative talkradio over the next few weeks.

Surnow initially pitched the concept as a latenight skein for the Fox television network, which passed. He took it to FNC topper Roger Ailes, who liked the idea and committed late last year to a trial on Fox News Channel.

"You can turn on any show and see Bush being bashed," Surnow said. "There really is nothing out there for those who want satire that tilts right."
________

You can watch some of it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjIfaMwIFxU

[Emu]

Who the hell is Joel Surnow

[Johnnie]

Dude, this show tilts towards the shitter. That video seemed that they tried hard way too hard to be funny. It makes Fox look like they just hate black people.

One seg discusses the timeless popularity on campus of T-shirts bearing the iconic image of Che Guevara. "We spin it into a campus T-shirt salesman who also sells T-shirts of Mao and Hitler," said co-producer Manny Coto.

How are these communist leaders related to Hitler?

[Miss Modular]

Let someone at the forum thread I posted this from explain it:

It comes behind the agenda: socialism is bad. If you wear a t-shirt with a picture of a socialist, you must also like Mao because he was a socialist. Mao was also a mass murderer, so it stands to reason that you must also be fond of other mass murderers like Hitler. Ha ha ha!

These people aren't even trying.

[Emu]

They don't need to. The Fox News viewer base will find it hilarious, on-target and topical anyway.

[Miss Modular]

I'm not talking about the ratings, I'm talking about the execution.

[Emu]

Well, so was I. What I'm saying is, why bother being genuinely funny or insightful when that's not what your viewers want? If Fox News gave two shits about execution or integrity, they wouldn't be blatantly ripping off another show.

[sspadowsky]

I think this will be about as successful as Air America was.

[Johnnie]

Let someone at the forum thread I posted this from explain it:

Quote:
It comes behind the agenda: socialism is bad. If you wear a t-shirt with a picture of a socialist, you must also like Mao because he was a socialist. Mao was also a mass murderer, so it stands to reason that you must also be fond of other mass murderers like Hitler. Ha ha ha!
These people aren't even trying.
__________________

That's a very shallow way of associating people...uneducated too, considering communists and nazis/fascists didn't get along. They had different ideologies.
What kind of people watch Fox? I'm not from the states, in case it seems like a dumb question.

[Emu]

I think the point they're trying to make is that it's just as retarded to wear a Che shirt as it is to wear a Hitler shirt. People (liberals) will buy anything with a famous face on it as long as it's not right wing am I right? stupid librals

[El Blanco]

If Fox News gave two shits about execution or integrity, they wouldn't be blatantly ripping off another show.

Can we replace Fox News with Jon Stewart?

News satire is not new and I can think of plenty attempts at it.

That said, what the hell are they thinking? Bush gets nailed by the Daily Show and Weekend Update because he is charge. He's got the bullseye. Clinton got piled on too. Granted, there seems to be a lot more bile behind the current jokes, but I don't think this will address it.

Another thing, FNC's audience isn't really going to dig the dancing on the obscene line that the liberal slanted shows do. SNL is at their best when doing that.

[Preechr]

I think I disagree.

Progressivism... please notice I don't call it Liberalism... lends itself very easily to satire. It's entirely based on feeling and utterly absent of any signs of logical reasoning. If you can't make comedy from that, you just suck at being funny...

This formula is exactly why the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is so funny. They both focus on the right wing theocratic trend that makes Republicans so obviously so un-American.

[Dr. Boogie]

It's the best thing to happen for right-wing humor since Mallard Filmore.

[Big Papa Goat]

I agree very much with Preechr on this. And for your enjoyment, I'll quote at length from a weirdly hilarious passage from a weirdly hilarious novel about the ridiculous situation in Austria just before WW1.

Originally Posted by Robert Musil

But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justification for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If f he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regretably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood...
Putting it another and perhaps better way, the man with an ordinary sense of reality is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whetherthere's any bait on it. His extraordinary indifference to the life snapping at the abit is matched by the risk he runs of doing utterly eccentric things. An impractical man--which he not only seems to be, but really is--will always beunreliable and unpredictable in his dealings with others. He will engage in actions that mean something else to him than to others, but he is at peace with himself about everything as long as he can make it all come together in a fine idea. He is quite capable of regarding a crime that brings harm to another person merely as a lapse to be blamed not on the criminal but on the society that produced the criminal. But it remains doubtful whether he would accept a slap in the face with the same detatchment, or take it impersonally as one takes the bite of a dog. The chances are that he would first hit back and then on reflection decide that he shouldn't have. Morever, if someone were to take away his beloved, it is most unlikely that he would today be quite ready to discount the reality of his loss and find compensation in some surprising new reaction.

And it goes on like this!

Well, I thought the whole thing was pretty hilarious, though I guess it doesn't really have a punchline or anything. Maybe it's the weird way the language sounds, kind of half way between an essay and a novel, or maybe it's the weirdness of the translation from German, but I think it has something more to do with the ridiculousness of the attitude he's describing.

[Miss Modular]

I'm waiting for Max's response.

[KevinTheOmnivore]

I don't really care if they're attaching liberalism, progressivism or Confucianism. It needs to be funny, and that wasn't very funny.

They should hire liberal writers.

[Emu]

That'd be a great show

[Stabby]

Agreed, liberals should be easy to make fun of. And I've seen a few clips of this new Fox show on youtube and the like. This show is missing the picture. The Daily Show isn't funny because it slants left, it's funny because it
uses satire and irony and works with actual events and takes actual quotes and arranges them cleverly and so on. If this show proves anything it's that not just any schmuck can write good political humour. It's cringe-inducing to watch. and they try SO hard to be "right-wing" and to work in the right-wing talking points that it feels like 'state-produced comedy' ... "Hey did you notice that Barrack Obama's middle name is HUSSEIN?!... plus he smells!"

[mburbank]

Turnow is the producer of "24". He wrote for "Miami Vice" and "The Equalizer". Who could possibly understand comedy better than a guy who writes Action shows for TV?

While there have been a few seriously funny right wingers (I like PJ Ororke and Ben Stein) this show is almost certainly doomed.

If Democrats do something stupid, you can bet Stewart and Colbert will make fun of them. Surnow has already dedicated himself to attacking the left.

To do good political satire, you have to have an open mind and your target should be authority way more thn it should be whatever your political 'tilt' is. Surnow from everything I've read is all about the chip on his shoulder. That rarely makes for good comedy.

And a further prediction, I don't think it will play with Fix News audience either. Really bad comedy is really bad comedy. They will need to rise to at very least the level of Larry the Cable Guy (who I hate) to get an audience.

[El Blanco]

Max is right. This simply doesn't git-er-done

[Rez]

i like watching massive failures like this.
makes incompetent dumbasses with grudges look less like the "fair-minded, equal opportunity" guys they bullshit everyone into accepting as a possibility.

[Preechr]

Yes, because popularity=competence.

[Rez]

in terms of a saire news show, i'd say that applies. get off yr high horse.