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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Half-Hour News Hour- Proving Conservatives Can't Be Deliberately Funny?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:28 / 26.02.07

So I saw the pilot of this show this morning, it wasn't a total travesty of a show, it didn't burn the faces of everyone who beheld it Raiders of the Lost Arc-style, but it wasn't that good either. Maybe it was first show nerves, dumping topicality for jokes about Che Guevara, Idi Amin and electric cars not lasting that long. It was at it's most amusing when it did a 'Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon' skit about how anything can be connected to and blamed on global warming if you try hard enough. But it noticeably didn't mention Republicans, Bush or Conservatives, if this pattern is continued then it would appear to be twenty-minutes of bashing the Democrats and liberals, we had incisive satire calling Hillary Clinton a phone-sex operator who would surround herself with lesbians if she were President and Ed Begley a prison-bitch.

Conservative Bloggers seem to love it, so I guess you can't say Fox don't know their market.

Is there any reason to hope it might improve, or do you think that this is actually the level of humour they want to keep at?

08:35 / 26.02.07

everything I've read about it points to it staying at this level. Unlike with most satire, as several writers have pointed out, this show has set itself up to attack the left - not the powers that be. Other satire, the closest comparison being John Stewart's show, and probably the Onion, attacking both sides, but hitting the leading powers as they are the primest targets - this just seems like it was set up by a bunch of right wingers who felt that they were being attacked so are lashing out at the left in defense.

09:15 / 26.02.07

Isn't this just shit for arseholes?

10:52 / 26.02.07

I've seen bits and pieces of it, which was all I could watch before being struck blind. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter in the White House are terrifying concepts to be sure, but the delivery was so godawful that it suggests to me that it is a pernicious force of anti-humor.

Seriously, watching this show makes me want to kick a puppy.

16:24 / 26.02.07

Fox Conservative in the Flak Engine will say they love it even if they don't, they are true partisans. They don't value free thought and independence the way we do. Their primary concern is ego. I doubt they percieve a lack of actual criticism or joke making at liberals expense, they probably just feel like they have no answer to the daily show's obvious brilliance.

So they manufacture another show that they will pretend, regardless of reality, is an equal or better response. Then they will sleep well at night again and be able to disregard all the video footage of the 'mission accomplished' banner and Dick Cheney claiming we'll be greeted as liberators or that the insurgency is in it's 'last throes.'

This show will be a hypnotic aid for conservatives themselves. Conservatives will be treated with kid gloves, knives will be thrown at everyone else, like usual. But to everyone else, conservatives propogandists are just like your little brother, they will do anything to irritate their opponents, especially copycat tactics.

We could maybe set out to just list the 1001 ways in which this whole idea is artless? Save ourselves the time of pointing everything out in paragraph form?

Perhaps a good question is, should the daily show make mockery of it on The Daily Show?

16:28 / 26.02.07

This just goes to show that the media is so biased to the Left-wing that even when you broadcast a deliberately Right-wing show it is somehow transformed by the TV into a pile of ineffectual crap.

07:24 / 28.02.07

Shockingly, I didn't even know this came out.

Outside of conservative blogs that I don't read, this hasn't made any real impact. Not on the news sources I check, not on the blogs I read, not on the message boards I go to, etc.

And there was some buzz regarding a conservative version of the Daily Show from the start. Actually, my response was that I didn't think it was going to work. Fox News would position it against the Daily Show and that would highlight all of the flaws.

14:03 / 28.02.07

I love 24, but then I learned that the writers/producers and creator of 24 are mostly hard-core conservatives, and that scared me a bit. Then I read lots of news articles where the show's use of torture is starting to have an effect on our real-life military - apparently young soliders over in Iraq are trying techniques that Jack Bauer used on the show on captives. 24 creator Joel Surnow describes himself as a conservative but one who does not like the Bush administration's policies overmuch in general... Kiefer Sutherland was asked about the pro-torture effect the show might having on American society, and he was sort of aghast at the idea, being a leftie himself. Most people interviewed said 'It's a TV show; it's not meant to be real life, it's entertainment and it's a fantasy' and left it at that.

14:10 / 28.02.07

>>>24 creator Joel Surnow describes himself as a conservative but one who does not like the Bush administration's policies overmuch in general<<<

Surnow is also the creator/producer of the Half-Hour News Hour, which seems pretty Pro-Right.

10:27 / 05.03.07

There was actually an article a little while ago:

Military Criticizes '24' Torture Scenes
The US military has criticized the producers of TV hit 24 for featuring too many scenes of Kiefer Sutherland's character Jack Bauer torturing suspects for information. Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan recently visited the set of the hit show in California to speak to the show's makers. Finnegan is concerned about the effect the torture scenes are having on US troops abroad as 24 is popular among members of the American armed forces. According to the New Yorker, Finnegan told the producers, "I'd like them to stop. They should do a show where torture backfires. The kids see it and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always (depicted as) the patriotic thing to do." (from imdb)

You have to see the irony that someone is more concerned about the effects of a show on troops then actually killing civilians and torturing prisoners.

10:35 / 05.03.07

To be fair the article is only about Mr. Finnegan's views on the show not on the Iraq war itself (which, from the excerpt, it doesn't get into).