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.








