Two months after Fox News dramatically fired star host Tucker Carlson, the channel has found a replacement for its 8 p.m. hour. Jesse Watters, who most recently co-hosted “The Five” and has hosted his own show at 7 p.m. since last year, will take over the network’s most coveted slot. This move effectively means the network expects that Watters will become its biggest star, since that’s what the 8 p.m. slot has traditionally meant for Fox.
It’s a curious choice, not least because there’s little in Watters’ career to suggest he will make viewers forget the person he replaced. Momentum may be enough to make him at least a moderate success — there are, after all, roughly a couple million people who will watch him just because he’s on Fox News and it’s 8:00 p.m. But to anchor its most sought-after hour, the network seems to have chosen a replacement-level talker, hoping he’s good enough not to drive viewers away.
Carlson’s appeal was more cerebral and considerably darker.
Fox News’ 8 p.m. hour has always been occupied by someone with a big personality and a wellspring of anger. Bill O’Reilly held it for over two decades until he was forced out in 2017 in a sexual harassment scandal; he crafted a persona of a tough-talking regular Joe who was fed up with mouthy women and ungrateful minorities, ready to give a nightly verbal punch in the face to everyone his viewers couldn’t stand.
Carlson’s appeal was more cerebral and considerably darker. If O’Reilly was a more articulate version of the guy at the bar ranting about how everything has gone to hell, Carlson offered a high-born brand of a class war against the cultural “elites.” Though he ditched the bow tie worn earlier in his career, he still came off as a prep school smarty-pants who warned viewers that there was a conspiracy afoot to replace “legacy Americans” with “Third World” immigrants. Whether he believed it or not, Carlson’s apocalyptic, xenophobic rhetoric appealed to the Fox audience. Like O’Reilly before him, Carlson became the most-watched host on cable news.
Whether Watters can have the same success is far from clear. On “The Five,” Watters trades quips with four other co-hosts. His personality is more jokey and less intense than O’Reilly or Carlson — or, for that matter, other hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.
That’s not to say he doesn’t serve up the same rancid stew of misogyny, homophobia, racism and conspiracy theories that Fox viewers expect. But his frat-guy presentation cuts a less distinct figure than Carlson or O’Reilly. And while he jokes, he’s not trying to do genuine comedy like Greg Gutfield (who will be moving to the 10 p.m. slot). Unlike Carlson, he lacks a well-defined ideological agenda, apart from looking for ways to “own the libs” on whatever the news of the day is.
There may be plenty of Fox viewers who will happily tune in to that for an hour each night. But Watters is effectively an internet troll who happens to be on TV. If you want a detailed breakdown of the latest right-wing obsession, he’s not the one you’d seek out; if on the other hand you merely want someone to smirk while delivering a zinger about Hunter Biden, Watters is your man. The network may tell its viewers what to fear, but its executives live in fear of those viewers. In the 2019 film “Bombshell,” about former Fox News chief Roger Ailes’ own sexual harassment scandal, a jaded producer at the network explains to a new hire the themes underlying the Fox News oeuvre: “The world is a bad place, people are lazy morons, minorities are criminals, sex is sick but interesting. Ask yourself, ‘What would scare my grandmother, or piss off my grandfather?’ And that’s a Fox story.” Those marching orders may not have changed, but as the audience and the things that make it mad evolve, Fox has to evolve with them. As the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit showed, the network may tell its viewers what to fear, but its executives live in fear of those viewers. The viewers must be given what they yearn for, and if they aren’t, they could decamp to one of Fox’s low-rent competitors like Newsmax or One America News. In the end, that endless pursuit of outrage is what matters most. The network constantly asks what will get its viewers upset. During the last election it was crime, today it’s transgender teens, and tomorrow it will be something else. Jesse Watters probably won’t provide anything new and compelling, but he’ll give them whatever Fox thinks they want.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
