![]() (“Our producers are really good at what they do, and so they don’t do a show where we’re going to be yelling at each other for 60 minutes,” co-host Dana Perino told me in an interview last year.) Especially over the past five years, when political divides truly rent apart some families, the show became a proxy for a scenario that many of us were trying to avoid: sitting at a dinner table with warring relatives, having it out in an uncomfortable shouting match in which someone decided to throw food across the table, and then wiping the potatoes and gravy off the wall and returning to the table the next night. Corny jokes, animal clips, talk of the hosts’ personal lives, and rapid shifts in subject matter have the effect of bringing down the temperature. The public television roundtable “The McLaughlin Group,” which fed off disagreement, debuted in the 1980s CNN’s “Crossfire” was so intent on provoking division that Jon Stewart famously claimed the show was “hurting America.” Most of the energy on ABC’s popular “The View” rests with the “Hot Topics” segment, where five mostly-liberal women rehash current events with one designated conservative-a slot currently occupied by Meghan McCain-and tensions often run high.Įven among those shows, “The Five” stands out for a rigid structure, an underlying sense of humor and a calculated mix of serious topics and lighthearted fluff. Unlike traditional news panels, where different voices competed in a free-for-all to make brief political points, “this was more like … a conversation among family,” Williams told me, “and the idea was, I guess, that you would become taken with these characters.”įox was hardly the first channel to discover that political conflict can be addictive viewing. He wanted to cast a show with five stock characters, among them a “leading man” type with a strong conservative voice a beautiful woman and what Ailes described as a “Falstaff-type” figure who would serve as the contrarian. It was inspired, Ailes told Williams, by a stretch of his career in the early 1970s when he had produced a pair of Broadway shows. Williams recalled the day, years earlier, when he was summoned to a conversation with then-Fox mastermind Roger Ailes, who described an idea he’d been developing for the hard-to-crack 5 p.m. I had been following the success of “The Five,” one of Fox News’ consistent ratings hits, and wanted to know what it was like to be the show’s only liberal voice. I spoke to Williams by phone in March 2020, a few days into the coronavirus lockdown, when he and his colleagues had just been sent home from the studio to ride out a pandemic of unknown length. ![]()
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