Beck tells The Daily Beast that he greenlighted the comedy show because it was clear GBTV’s lineup needed to lighten up. “You know I’m not the cheeriest sometimes,” says Beck, who is notorious for his gloomy apocalyptic rants. “I wanted to add some laughs to the network to show it had some range to it, that it’s not just me.”…

“As much as everybody in the comedy business wants to say they’re fair and they have no sacred cows, I beg to differ with them,” Beck says. “They may think they’re that way but they generally lean left.” For him, the model of equal-opportunity mockery is The Simpsons. Beck says the Fox cartoon “will say something that really hacks me off, but they’ll follow that joke in the same episode and hit the other side just as hard.” This is the philosophy he hopes The B.S. of A. will take: “If it deserves to be poked at, poke.” No sacred cows…

Sack and company acknowledge the pitfalls of partisan comedy on both sides of the aisle. The notion of a Republican comedy show is fundamentally flawed, Sack says, because “there are some [conservative] issues that it’s really hard to draw humor out of.” And on the left, he sees Bill Maher as the prime example of why throwing red meat to one politically charged segment of the population doesn’t make great comedy. “I watch Bill Maher but the audience just turns me off because they’re so rabid,” he says. “No matter what he says, as long as he’s throwing a bone to the left, you know, ‘George Bush is stupid!’ Woo-hoo! It’s like, oh God, I get it and I agree, but shut up.”