This week, for the first time in many years, Fox News announced an official reboot of its weeknight prime-time lineup. The reboot was more of a reshuffling, I suppose. Rather than bring in any fresh faces or take a chance on new talent, the network just rearranged some existing pieces, like a Scrabble player frantically trying to make something legible out of an all-consonant draw. Seems like a pretty low-effort revamp to me, but, hey, if your audience is willing to let you play BRTGSVX as a word, I suppose there’s no reason to rack your brain for anything better.
As a result, the new Fox News will look and sound a whole lot like the old Fox News—with a few key differences. Alleged funnyman Greg Gutfeld will move his eponymous late-night show from 11 p.m. to 10 p.m., which may prove a tougher time slot for his weird, alienating riffs. Gutfeld’s move bumps Laura Ingraham up by three hours, from 10 p.m. to 7 p.m., where she will now serve as the opening act for inexplicably popular dope Jesse Watters, who moves from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sean “The Survivor” Hannity stays right where he belongs in the 9 p.m. slot, where his perfervid populist rants play well with the “fake news” fanatics.
All four anchors can be counted on to advance the network’s long-standing war against woke liberal elites while minimizing the sort of actually deranged editorial excursions that might leave Fox News open to a very expensive lawsuit. Go, team!
The changes were catalyzed by three main factors, the most important of which is the network’s recent and alarming prime-time ratings slump. Though Fox News still draws the best ratings of all cable news networks, its prime-time ratings are way down relative to its own past performance. In June, for example, Fox News almost got beat in prime time by MSNBC, which would have been sort of like the Washington Generals beating the Harlem Globetrotters because the Globetrotters decided to suit up Brian Kilmeade instead of any actual good players.
The second factor is related to the first: the network’s abrupt decision, in April, to sever ties with popular host Tucker Carlson, whose sneering brand of internet-brained xenophobia and rousing Jan. 6 denialism gave him great clout with viewers and the Republican Party but put him at odds with Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch, who prefers his hosts to be a little more pliable. Though Carlson lost the internal power struggle with Murdoch and Fox executives, it was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for the network, which has foundered since Carlson’s exit.
The third factor, I believe, involves the network’s recent $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation lawsuit related to Fox’s role in spreading baseless claims of vote fraud after the 2020 election. The massive Dominion settlement was the result of an unforced error by Fox, which exercised insufficient editorial control over some of its Trumpiest voices in the months after President Biden won. With Donald Trump leading the pack of GOP presidential contenders—and with his weird grievances having gotten even weirder and grievancier since 2020—you can be sure that Fox News wants to make sure that its hosts can be trusted to show some editorial discipline and avoid any further expensive liability.
With these factors in mind, the network’s prime-time moves sort of start to make sense. Fox News wants hosts who will draw ratings but who won’t rock the boat; marquee talents who are nevertheless aware of their own expendability. Every single member of the network’s new prime-time lineup fits the bill. Watters and Gutfeld have done well in their solo time slots, and continue to do very well as co-hosts of Fox’s world-beating panel show The Five; it’s not entirely stupid to presume that their popularity will carry over to these more prominent time slots. Gutfeld is a former men’s magazine editor who hosted a bizarre overnight show for Fox before vaulting to prominence as a panelist on The Five. The network eventually gave him his own “funny” late-night talk show, and it was Fox’s most interesting programming decision in years. While Gutfeld has done very well in the 11 p.m. time slot, his first taste of true television success came to him relatively late in life—the host is 58—which implies, to me, that he does not take it for granted. Gutfeld surely knows that he will never find commensurate success at any other cable network.
The career of Jesse Watters is in many ways a testament to the enduring power of white male privilege in an allegedly “woke” era. Watters is a man of few talents. To judge by his body of work, he’s not particularly smart, or funny, or insightful; he evinces the milky smugness of the bully’s dumb henchman in some lame 1980s slobs-vs.-snobs comedy. And yet while this clear mediocrity might serve to devastate some other aspiring anchor’s career trajectory, Watters keeps on climbing the ladder at Fox News. He got his start as a production assistant for Bill O’Reilly, first found fame conducting irritating ambush interviews for O’Reilly’s show, and now has taken over his old boss’s former time slot. While Watters is just as conservative and self-satisfied as O’Reilly and Carlson—his two immediate predecessors in the 8 p.m. hour—there’s nothing messianic about him. He will do what he’s told and will be glad for the chance to be paid handsomely to do so.
Laura Ingraham initially tried and failed at a television career back in the early Obama years—her first Fox News show, Just In, didn’t even last a month—before Fox News gave her a second chance back in the early days of the Trump administration. Her show has done fine at 10 p.m., but anyone else’s show would also have done just as fine in the same time slot; she’s a perfectly cromulent culture warrior who has never made for must-watch television. But her whole “contemptuous church lady” thing might actually play well at 7 p.m., a time when all the other contemptuous church ladies out there are still awake. Sean Hannity, for his part, is the consummate company man, a necessary force of continuity in the network’s prime-time lineup. Well liked internally, Hannity has been at Fox News literally since Day One, and you can probably count on him to keep fulminating against Hollywood perverts and the woke media every weeknight until the very end of time.
When Roger Ailes came up with the idea for The Five many years ago, he famously cast the show not for specific individuals, but for character types: the funny guy, the leading man, “the leg.” Ailes told his initial hosts that they were about to become very rich, but that they were also all extremely replaceable, which has proven to be true: The show has cycled through co-hosts even as its ratings have stayed strong and gotten stronger. Now, the network’s prime-time lineup is more or less constructed around The Five’s casting model, with anchors who know that they owe their TV careers to Fox News and not their own personal brands. Going into the 2024 campaign season, Fox News prime time is now filled with people who will toe the line. If they don’t, well, they can always try to join Tucker Carlson on Twitter.
