"The ½ Hour News Hour" (2007) TV series

Creators:

Manny Coto
Joel Surnow

Seasons:

1

Release Date:

18 February 2007 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy

Plot Keywords:

Short Lived | Critically Bashed | Number In Title

Cast

Kurt Long	...	Kurt McNally (17 episodes, 2007)
Jennifer Robertson	...	Jennifer Lange (17 episodes, 2007)
Dennis Miller	...	Himself (13 episodes, 2007)
Jamie McShane	...	Timothy Cox (12 episodes, 2007)
Erin Matthews	...	Guest / ... (10 episodes, 2007)
Rush Limbaugh	...	Himself / ... (8 episodes, 2007)
Regan Burns	...	Tim Davenport / ... (7 episodes, 2007)

Also Known As:

The Half Hour News Hour (USA) (alternative spelling)
This Just In (USA) (working title)

Runtime:

USA:22 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Twentieth Century Fox

Fox News needs a better approach to comedy

This show was canceled after 16 episodes, and rightfully so. After watching Fox News's answer to the "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" for a few seconds, you instantly get the feeling that the show comes off as a little too....... fake.

Lets start with its production values, to be more specific, the laugh track. My god, it is an abomination of television. The show's content was not funny enough to film in front of a live studio audience, so they took the route of the midnight infomercial. The laugh track is the most comedic part of the show and the reason why I watched every episode, it fades in and out very fast and the volume of the laughter varies every joke.

Secondly, the "comedy" presented in the show and the message the producers were trying to get across never once strayed from conservatism. "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" have had success, largely due to the criticism of the political process as a whole, not just one side of the spectrum. The ways the "1/2 Hour News Hour" presented itself were not only extremely bias, but left its American viewers feeling more divided at the end of the day. Every show followed the same format, they attempted to make jokes about liberal people, organizations, and politics. They would then go on to have actors portray liberals as guests on the show, often dumb, drug users, "artsy", and Hollywood types. My biggest concern was, where were the real guests? The two Comedy Central Shows have them on every night, real guests, both liberal and conservative, with real answers to questions directed at them. Giving the other side a chance to answer is fair, and informative, and leaves viewers with a feeling that they actually just watched the news. Fox News, however, felt that it would be more effective to paint a picture of a liberal and argue with that instead, leaving the viewer with an eerie feeling as if you watching propaganda and knew it.

In the end, this show got what was coming to it. There are still talks about reworking it to have it back on the air, but regardless of whether it does or not, season 1 will go down in the history books as one of the bigger flops in cable television history.