Fox News Struggles to Replace Glenn Beck
How do you replace Glenn Beck's bizarre and rambling hour of television? If you come up with programming on Fox News, you decide that 5pm is a great time to do a conservative version of the The McLaughlin Group, call it "The Five" and roll with it.
FrumForum will be providing more coverage of this new show later in the week, but I wanted to provide a few comments about the hour that I watched.
The current show feels like a placeholder. Rather then replace Beck with a host, Fox News plans to rotate through a long roster of hosts and see which ones stick and which ones don't. Once they find out which hosts work best, presumably they will be the ones who will stay with and host is long-term.
By just sticking with Fox News commentators they already have, the show feels a bit lazy. However, after having Beck bounce of chalk boards and play with puppets, having five conservatives sit around the table and compete to see who has the best grasp of that morning's talking points is refreshingly mundane.
On the premier episode, the five hosts were Eric Bolling, Andrea Tantaros, Greg Gutfeld, Dana Perino, and Bob Beckel. Bob Beckel's job was to be the token liberal who can be ganged up on by the four conservatives. Media Matters staffer Seth Michaels (one wonders how many people in that office volunteered to watch this show) tweeted that a better name for the show would be "Hannity, Hannity, Hannity, Hannity, and Colmes"
The episode opened up with a discussion about the debt ceiling negotiations. Four of the panelists lamented how irresponsible Obama had been for all his spending and making the deficits soo big. Bob Beckel said that Grover Norquist was responsible for the Republicans being unable to reach a deal and added that Norquist should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. Beckel was self-aware enough to grumble and complain about the group-think of his co-hosts but it's hard to take that seriously when you've agreed to go on the network in the first place. Still, his continued dissenting from the group made the conversation a little less lock-step.
The gimmick on "The Five" is that each host gets to lead off a short segment of the show. Eric Bolling began the debt discussion, Dana Parino talked about the ban on incandescent lightbulbs, and Greg Gutfeld got to talk about Perp Walks (like the ones that Casey Anthony and Dominique Strauss-Kahn had to do). Gutfeld was tasked to consider an important question: do perp walks make potentially innocent people look guilty? Does this harm our system of justice?
Greg Gutfeld usually hosts the Fox News "Red Eye" show at 3am which is more irreverent then the usual news. He provided the insight that pert walks: "makes you look guilty, but sexy."
Fox News has decided that the best way to replace Glenn Beck was to just stick five commentators at a table and see what happens. With nine commentators on their roster, there are 81 possible combinations of host that they can try out. Maybe one of them will be amusing and interesting.