Last month, for instance, “Red Eye” was watched by an average of three hundred and thirty-nine thousand insomniacs, including a hundred and thirty-seven thousand in the key demographic of viewers between twenty-five and fifty-four years old. For a program broadcast at three in the morning, though, that’s an impressive feat: by comparison, Chris Hayes, the 8 P.M. host on MSNBC, attracted only a hundred and eleven thousand viewers in that demographic.
The central insight of “Red Eye” was its contention that cable news is driven as much by the demands of time as by the demands of ideology. Every show, every day, is another hour that must be filled with chatter, no matter the quantity or quality of the day’s news. And while conventional cable news shows work hard to maintain a tone of urgency, “Red Eye” was often unapologetically slack: the joke was that Gutfeld and his guests had nothing better to do—and neither, apparently, did you, the viewer. With any luck, he will continue to bring that puncturing sensibility to the rest of the network. In the meantime, it’s worth pausing to give him credit for creating a show so ridiculous that it could make everything around it seem ridiculous, too. After Gutfeld’s final “Red Eye” broadcast, in the small hours of Saturday morning, the network cut to commercial, and then moved swiftly to the next show: a rebroadcast of that evening’s “Kelly File,” with Shannon Bream as the guest host. She began with a breathless monologue: “Breaking tonight! The first big test for the 2016 Presidential hopefuls is under way! Already some contenders are rising to the top, while others are seeing their political dreams”—a theatrical pause—“slip away.” Surely some “Red Eye” fans, too lazy to change the channel, were still watching, waiting in vain for the punchline.
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