The ½ Hour News Hour

I'm assuming that this is the debut episode of The Half Hour News hour, airing at 10 PM on Sunday, February 18th and it is awful. The "comedians" hosting it are to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert what Colt 45 is to Dom Perignon. The jokes, if you want to call them that, are all followed by a terrible laugh track that would embarrass the worst of the 1980s sitcoms. It really isn't an issue for me that its slanted so far right, but it also seems to be slanted towards idiots who laugh at anything, or those who are partially lobotomized. The jokes are terribly unfunny, and if they put this up against Colbert or Stewart, I don't see it lasting that long. Comedy Central's newsy-ish shows may be tilted slightly to the left, but they do make fun of everyone, not just liberals, Democrats, the ACLU, and revolutionary historical figures. Avoid this show if you can, but I don't think you'll have to worry for long anyway. You might like this show if you meet two out of three of the following: 1. You dislike homosexuals. 2. You believe that global warming is hoax made up by liberal elitist "so-called" scientist. 3. You're still holding out for those WMDs in Iraq.

This show is meant to be in the same vein of The Daily Show but is lacking on a few fronts. The easy review is that the show really isn't funny. This would be an overall facile assessment of the show as a whole.

First of all, the show is set up with two hosts. This creates the need for each host to tee up jokes and play off of the other. They didn't really have the chemistry in order to do this the way The SNL cast does on those fleeting moments when they actually end up making a hit sketch. Instead the tee offs are rigid and scripted and it shows in the joke delivery. This interplay could have been developed, but with only several hours of screen time that type of rapport has not developed. Unfortunately in that type of show business, you need to hit the ground running. Especially on Fox, where shows are often given only a half season to show their strengths.

Next is the writing. They must have known that the show want going draw out the laughs from a studio audience and decided to laugh track it instead. There are jokes told that just really aren't funny, but do succeed in being ironic. There are other jokes, that with proper delivery would have provoked an audible laugh from an audience. But in the eight or nine episodes that I watched, I actually laughed perhaps four times. Some of the jokes take too much internal context that by the time you work out why it was a joke, the punch of it has been reduced. Most of the rest are just very simple jokes based on political tropes, yet less masterfully done than John Stewart (and some of this is due to the back and forth dynamic breaking up the tempo of delivery).

Then, just in case you aren't certain that it is a legitimate spoof of another news spoof show (in case you thought it was a knockoff SNL news sketch) they bring in Dennis Miller for his special brand of pointing out something inane and tying it in to a little known, vaguely related (if that) reference and pretending to be high-brow about it. Cobbling these different styles together breaks up any tempo that may have been built and creates an incongruous comedic situation; those who would find the standard part of the show funny probably fail to 'get' the jokes from Miller and those who appreciate Miller's humor likely consider the rest of the show merely grasping for low hanging fruit.

TLDR: the show suffered from the market forces of not being appealing to any demographic by being a comedy show devoid of humor. It was a true testament to the Libertarian experiment.

Well the only good thing to say about this horrid show is that it will be certainly be short lived. The "jokes" are truly unlike anything I have ever seen on television before in that they have absolutely no bias towards humor. Also it makes you wonder how Fox News will be able to continue to claim to be fair and balanced after laying this egg. Unlike the Daily Show it was meant to mimic the HHNH makes no attempt at throwing jabs at both sides of the political spectrum. The show leans so far right it's a wonder it doesn't fall over (that was a bad joke, but it is far funnier than anything you'll see on the HHNH). On the other hand it should be fun to watch Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh continue to pretend that this stinker is funny.

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.

I thought this was beyond awful. There are some truly(intentionally) funny Cons out there, but none are associated with this show. I mean Dennis Miller, a frequent FauxNewsChannel guest was amazing on SNL's Weekend Update.While I didn't expect him to appear on the show, it seems like he would have been a far better choice to develop/create/ consult on a show of this nature that a wrong wing idealogical hack, who is responsible for 24, the show which glorifies torture, & the propaganda piece on 9/11 that aired on ABC last year. Penn, of Penn &Teller, is also a Con(Libertarian, actually).HE could have consulted on this & added real humor, even if it was skewed to the wrong side.Colin Quinn, also an SNL Weekend Update alum, is also a Con(if you saw his show that ran on Comedy Central, you;d know this). Danny Bonaduce showed his Con side in his ad libs on his recent GSN show.Even Rupert Murdock is funny.

ANYONE with even an ounce of humor would have made this work,even to a devout Liberal, such as myself, if only it thought about what was really funny. I laugh at Miller & Quinn all the time, despite the fact that I disagree with nearly everything they say. I do so because they are actually funny, unlike this show. Duchess