Eric Bolling, former co-host of The Five, will be returning to Fox News next week with a new show in a familiar time slot. The network recently announced that Bolling's show will be co-hosted by Kat Timpf and Eboni Williams and will air at 5 p.m., the same time slot as Bolling's previous show. Bolling's new show will be called Fox News Specialists, while The Five will move from its traditional time slot to 9 p.m.
Not surprisingly, the network's Executive Vice President of Programming, Suzanne Scott, assures viewers that it will be chock full of whiz-bang excitement.
According to Scott, the hosts' diverse opinions will provide viewers with an hour of "entertaining analysis" on topics that are of interest.
In other words, it will be exactly like every other prime time Fox News offering.
“The combination of the co-hosts’ expertise in business, millennial and legal topics, respectively, will make for lively and compelling discourse,” promised Scott.
And now for something completely similar...
Conservative media outlets are hyping the bejeezus out of this new show, using clickbaity headlines featuring words like "major announcement" and "big shakeup". One popular conservative website even went so far as to hail the new show as "groundbreaking", even though each of the three co-hosts are familiar faces to Fox viewers-- perhaps a little too familiar.
Aside from his long tenure on The Five, Bolling has frequently filled in as guest host for Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, and will continue to helm his Saturday morning show Cashin' In. Timpf-- the network's token snarky millenial-- is a fixture on any number of shows currently or previously hosted by Greg Gutfeld, and Williams is a Fox News contributor who regularly appears on The Five and Outnumbered.
And that is exactly the reason why Fox News Specialists is destined to fail like William Hung at a New York Metropolitan Opera audition.
Tune into any given Fox News show at any given time and you'll find any given combination of Eric Bolling, Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Kat Timpf. Taking a host from one show and giving them a new show in a new time slot isn't groundbreaking-- it's a Chinese takeout menu (choose one Fox personality from Column A, one Fox personality from Column B and one from Column C).
Add to the mix one of your standard "special" guests, and Fox News turns into an R&B playlist. Instead of Drake feat. DJ Khaled w. Rihanna, Rihanna feat. Drake w. Nicki Minaj, or Kanye West feat. Drake w. DJ Khaled, you end up with Bolling feat. Guilfoyle w. Chris Stirewalt and Mercedes Schlapp, or Guilfoyle feat. Chris Stirewalt w. Eric Bolling and Charles Krauthammer, or Gutfeld feat. Eric Bolling w. Kimberly Guilfoyle and Kat Timpf.
It's almost as bad as the Food Network's attempt to see how many different shows they can squeeze Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay into.
This is why Tucker Carlson has been so successful. He's not the product of what I like to call "network inbreeding"-- the pathetic attempt to catch lightning in a bottle by mixing and matching the same handful of hosts with the same handful of "special guests".
Fox News' gene pool could use a little more chlorine
Here's some advice for Suzanne Scott-- there's nothing special about the same guest appearing on seven different Fox News shows over the course of two days. It's like Taco Bell attempting to come up with new menu items; there are only so many different ways you can put together a tortilla, cheese and ground beef before it all starts to taste the same. I don't know about the rest of you Fox News viewers, but I'm getting pretty darn tired of eating a Greg Gutfeld crunchwrap three times a day.
Not that some of the regular guests wouldn't make great hosts if given the chance. Charles Krauthammer is always insightful. Why not give him his own show?
They can call it Hammer Time, or just give him a recurring segment on an existing show and call it Kraut's Korner. It wouldn't be any more ridiculous than taking The Five out of its 5 p.m slot and moving it to 9 p.m. and still calling it The Five, and it's not nearly as ridiculous as pairing up your stock performers for a new show and calling it Fox News Specialists.
Or, to put that R&B terms: Eric Bolling feat. Kat Timpf w. Eboni Williams.
Not to tell Suzanne Scott her business, but if Fox News really wanted to offer viewers something 'entertaining' or 'lively', they would turn their backs on network inbreeding and give a show to someone outside the gene pool like Michael Savage, Buck Sexton, Mark Levin or any number of other proven talk radio superstars.
Or any number of up-and-coming conservative journalists and media personalities like Lucian Wintrich of The Gateway Pundit or Rebel Media's Gavin McInnes.
Otherwise, Fox News Specialists is destined to become just one more beefy, cheesy burrito on the bloated Fox News menu.
