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 Review: Scarborough Country by paws o'henry "Scarborough Country" is probably the most exciting show on television. No, not really, that's just something I said because I didn't have an opening. In reality, it's a show on MSNBC that I often watch on mute because we aren't allowed to watch programs with sound at my job. I work at a silent movie theater. The show is fascinating because, at least on mute, Joe Scarborough is the mannerism clone of Bill O'Reilly, the guy on Fox News who yells at everyone. Scarborough has mastered the bemused-yet-repulsed O'Reilly smirk, the common-sense head tilt, the smug straight-talk nod. I would call him the poor man's O'Reilly except that he's much handsomer than O'Reilly, who is not handsome at all. 
I mention Scarborough's handsomeness because his producers have done a very good job of stealing the Fox News trick of making sure everyone he disagrees with is icky looking. The standard setter for this is of course "Hannity and Colmes," the Fox faux faceoff between handsome conservative Sean Hannity and Freaky Mutant from Space-looking liberal Alan Colmes. Note that the conservatives on these shows tend to be tan and good looking, by the standards of politics people, who tend not to be that good looking, while the liberals are grotesque. On today's episode Scarborough is silently arguing with a UCLA media professor who we know is the bad guy because 1. he has long white thinning hair and 2. he is a professor from Los Angeles. Scarborough, it turns out when I briefly turn up the volume, has a Southern accent. His voice is so markedly different from O'Reilly's that people who listen to his show with the sound on might not notice that he's ripping of O'Reilly's every facial tic. The Southern accent lets we normal Americans know that Scarborough, a former Florida Congressman, is a common-sense guy, one of us. All of these shows are obsessed with straight talk. That's what they've decided appeals to the conservative audiences they want to reach. They've decided to make conservatives their target audiences because Fox has had such success reaching out to right-wing viewers. But Fox and its copycats, of which MSNBC is the most cravenly unoriginal, not only want to be conservative but also present themselves as middle-of-the-road and inscrutably fair. People who accuse them of being right-wing are clearly out of touch with middle America. Straight talk, to most of these programs, is a synonym for "fast talk," which makes for good television because it's the preferred medium for those of us with very short attention spans. People whose ideas take too long to explain are clearly scam artists of some kind. Explanations that go on for more than a minute clearly require some sort of moral complexity that we find suspect. Saddam Hussein is bad. We are good. Terrorists hate us because we love freedom. None of this has anything to do with oil. I don't know what the ratings are like for Scarborough's show, but I suspect it will eventually do well if it doesn't already. It is a fine example of our country's extremely sophisticated process of refining anything successful until anything not contributing to the success is removed, and anything contributing to it is magnified. O'Reilly's bad looks aren't helping the show; they're out. The speed and common sense thing is good -- more of that. Scarborough Country's greatest weakness is that the show hasn't quite gotten the speed thing down. During the "Lightning Round" segment (which really is called the "Lightning Round,") each issue of the day is debated for a full minute and a half. That's almost enough time for a real news story. The show emphasizes the lightning-like quality of this segment by showing an actual ticking clock counting away the seconds. O'Reilly has managed to reduce the amount of wasted time on his show by cutting off his guests after about their sixth word. The Scarborough clock, however, shows that he often lets guests speak as long as he does, without interruption. This is one area for improvement. The show's greatest strength, or perhaps the one most obvious to me since I watch the show on mute, is its headlines. Scarborough's producers do a magical job of framing issues in a manner that saves us the time of deciding whether something is right or wrong. Recent favorites include, "Liberals Hijack Grads," "French Ruin Cannes," and "Pill Promotes Promiscuity?" Scarborough should learn to frame issues as narrowly as his headline writers if he wants to out-Fox his body language mentor. Hijacking bad. Straight-talk good. Better, handsomer, faster. |
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