A Review of Fox News's Red Eye

It would be a trying task for even the most imaginative human being to envision a satirical news program worse than Fox News’s Red Eye, which can be seen each weeknight at 2:00 am. The program is hosted by a man named Greg Gutfield, who—if his performance on the show is any indication of the sort of person he is, and I believe it is—is one of the most bucolic, classless, childish, and unfunny people I have ever had the displeasure of watching. Gutfield’s three regular blogger panelists, who somehow manage to be his equal in terms of knavery and tastelessness, ought not to have their names mentioned, lest someone erroneously believe that these two young men and one young woman are worth remembering.

Gutfield too, would be a forgettable figure were it not for his nightly “comedic” performances which are so monumentally awful, so humorless, so artificial, so lacking in anything which even remotely might be said to contain an iota of wit, that the viewer is essentially forced to remember this phony man and his equally phony act.

To call Red Eye sophomoric would be to insult greatly television shows which have been accused of having that characteristic. In attempting to be edgy, the show—steered by the inept Gutfield—quite often takes a politically incorrect turn, and fails to achieve, despite its best efforts, a punch line that any half-wit simpleton from America’s Red State backwaters would find worthy of a whiskey-induced chuckle. The regular panelists, however, frequently cannot help but laugh uncontrollably at each other’s “jokes” and “commentary;” and this simply amplifies the pathetic nature of this half-baked project which not even a stoner who is as high as a kite would find amusing.

Concerning the aforementioned “edginess” of the show, Friday’s program featured a fine example Red Eye’s political incorrectness in action. During a segment which lasted about just under three minutes (which, as a length of time for each of the show’s discussion topics, is par for the course, if not longer than the average), host Gutfield and panel doubted the effectiveness of slipping roofies into drinks as a method for male bar patrons to incapacitate unsuspecting females so that they may rape them. Gutfield implied that the so called date rape drug Rohypnol is just some kind of scapegoat which drunk women who have been taken advantage of blame for their having been raped. Subsequently a comment was made or a verbal exchange occurred, which was missed by this observer (attempts to locate a transcript for this and other episodes of Red Eye on foxnews.com were unsuccessful), that prompted uncontrollable laughter from the pack of cackling hyenas, and carried through the break and into the next segment. Who would have thought that slipping women roofies could make for such knee-slapping conversation?

I could reel off some further remarks about other segments on the show, but no description, no matter how illustrative, could do justice to that which is being described. To appreciate truly the stupidity of Red Eye, one must witness it first hand, although I will certainly excuse those who wish to spare themselves from such an unpleasant experience. All in all, Red Eye is a forced, awkward, bombastic piece of programming which attains a level of idiocy which might otherwise be somewhat entertaining were it not for the show’s unbelievably pathetic and contemptible nature.

~Max