"It's just tragic to see her like this," says Brooke Alvarez as she gazes at video footage of a woman encircled by menacing captors.
But it's not the reporter's condition that shocks the glam host. It's the victim's lack of hair conditioner. Alvarez's indignation flares. "It's hard to comprehend how anyone, even a terrorist, could treat a TV personality's hair that way."
That smell in the air is TV news' not-so-sacred cows being fried up by the folks at The Onion. The satire sheet started in 1988 by University of Wisconsin-Madison juniors Tim Keck and Christopher Johnson has bloomed into a multi-platform hotbed of humor.
This month, The Onion makes the leap to TV with two shows hoping to capitalize on the fake-news phenomenon pioneered by Comedy Central. The network already has turned Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert into headline-generating stars (and hopes to do the same for comic Jon Benjamin, whose newsmagazine spoof, Jon Benjamin Has a Van, launches this summer).
First up: Onion SportsDome, premiering Tuesday at 10:30 ET/PT on Comedy Central, a half-hour described as a "rundown of the finest in sports, news, analysis, scores, highlights, rumor-mongering and petty personal attacks." Any similarity to ESPN's SportsCenter is wildly intentional.
And arriving Jan. 21 on cable's Independent Film Channel is Onion News Network's FactZone With Brooke Alvarez, whose host is touted as "the world's most respected news reader." She'd have to be, to deliver stories about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il threatening the West with annihilation unless he's allowed to play Batman on the big screen, without batting her perfectly curled eyelashes.
As fake news mushrooms, blame real news. The built-in bombast and touch-screen mayhem common to cable yakathons is too tempting to resist. "Debuting on TV now is perfect, because the line is so fine between comedy and real media," says Will Graham, executive producer (with Julie Smith) and director of both programs. "If anything, it's hard to be more ridiculous than some of those cable shows. We'll just have to try and make our graphics swooshier and anchors louder."
Both shows trade on a brand of comedy honed in those early university years, a pre-Internet time when networks and major publications delivered the news with post-Watergate gravitas. Headlines in The Onion quickly garnered attention for both their outrageousness and their multi-leveled wit. (The Obama election declaration is typical of the breed: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job.")
Then as now, for a joke to make the grade, it has to combine "that journalistic voice we all know with a delivery that's absolutely straight," says head writer Carol Kolb, who joined out of college in 1997. "We never thought there was some large goal or that we should get rich. We were just excited when people read what we wrote."
Growing pains
In the early days, The Onion subsisted as a college-town free weekly stuffed with coupons. But in 1996, as that business model was jeopardized by the burgeoning Web, The Onion went online. Though it was popular, the company flirted with bankruptcy until 2000, when investor David Shafer bought what would become a majority stake and moved the company headquarters from Madison to Manhattan.
Since then, The Onion's audience has grown and its fortunes improved, thanks in part to an expansion of its satire empire to include books (such as the Our Dumb World series), a radio program and its two websites: TheOnion.com, with 8 million visitors a month, and the non-satirical pop-culture counterpart The A.V. Club (avclub.com), which draws 2 million.
The online-video-focused Onion News Network, which launched in 2007, won a Peabody Award in 2009 for its send-up of 24/7 cable news shows judges described as "hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing." That triumph led directly to the new FactZone show.
Onion caretakers remain optimistic about the original print product, which in 2009 had to pull out of cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco because of a lack of advertisers. CEO Steve Hannah recently set up a franchise model, hoping to expand into new markets with the help of licensed partners. "We just want to be well-positioned no matter where the audience goes," Hannah says.
The Onion's parodies of staples such as SportsCenter, Fox's O'Reilly Factor, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 and all their high-tech gizmos (FactZone co-host Tucker Hope is "the recipient of several industry awards for the skilled manipulation of the touch-screen monitor") couldn't be timelier for cable channels hoping to ride today's comedy-news boom.
"Although our background is in independent film, we want to push into alternative forms of music and comedy," says IFC's Jennifer Caserta. "FactZone will be different from programs like The Colbert Report. With our show, there are no winks to the audience."
Comedy Central development head Kent Alterman says FactZone didn't appeal because it seemed too similar to The Daily Show(which SportsDome leads into) and Colbert. "But SportsDome is a double bonus, because we get The Onion and sports, which comedy fans tend to already be into. They'll get the vernacular," he says.
Such comedy shows "assume a tremendous sophistication on the part of the audience in order for them to get the joke," says Arthur Smith, researcher with the Paley Center for Media in New York. "But the turning point was a decade back, with the rise of The Daily Show. Since then, this kind of comedy has been taking off."
'Media-savvy' audience
Comedy programs riffing off the media are the best lure for reeling in the advertiser-coveted 18-49 age demographic, says Anne Libera, director of comedy studies in a joint program run by The Second City comedy troupe and Chicago's Columbia College.
"That young TV audience is so media-savvy today, which is why parody works so well," says Libera, whose housemate at Northwestern University was Colbert ("He'd make futon frames in our basement," she says). "There's a lot of comedy on TV now, but I'd argue that there's also a big demand for it from this generation. More than ever, it seems comedy is how people comment on the world around them."
Libera says The Onion has one distinct advantage over The Daily Show or Colbert, which trade almost exclusively in factual events. "By making a lot up, The Onion folks are not tied to the 24-hour news cycle," she says. "They can satirize an idea, as opposed to being forced to satirize an actual event. They've got comedic breathing room."
They've also got years of video experience honed online. The Internet serving as "a minor league for television is something we're going to see more of," says Andrew Steele, creative director at FunnyOrDie.com and executive producer of its TV offspring, Funny or Die Presents, which starts its second season on HBO Friday.
"There was a time when people pitched a TV show, but now they're more likely to send you a link to a video," says Steele.
Online experimentation allowed Onion writers to develop a range of characters that eventually formed the backbone of the new shows. SportsDome's anchors, Mark Shepard and Alex Reiser, reek of self-importance whenever they're not cutting away to fellow reporters such as "Wish Zone" host Jay Woodworth, who grants terminally ill children wishes as long as they're sports-related, and analyst Doc Webb, who refers to athletes as "overpaid garbage."
There are familiar digs at soccer (the anchors recap four years of Major League Soccer action in about 15 seconds) and de rigueur coverage of offbeat sports (which in SportsDome-land means a regular look at the duels between meth addicts and their demons).
Over in the FactZone, there isn't a cable-news staple that isn't filleted. "The Chessbeckler Stance with Joad Chessbeckler" features angry political commentary on everything from why the nation should return to the gold standard to the best way to skin a raccoon. "Cross Examination With Shelby Cross" allows a former prosecutor to weigh in on major cases without worrying about pesky facts. And "Eye on America" lets the Onion News Network "tap into its 12,408 local affiliates for a glimpse at what's happening with the little people out there in those flyover states."
For the comic brain trust spearheading The Onion's TV forays, network and cable news is more than just inspiration. It's competition.
Director Graham recalls a recent story meeting when everyone assembled was getting excited about a quirky idea. "Before we could work on it, the person said, 'No, hang on, I actually saw that on Fox.' So, in many ways, they're already the best comedy out there," Graham says. "But that's our target. If you flip onto either of our shows and for a second think you're on a real news program, we've succeeded."
September 2009. Two newspapers in Bangladesh apologized to shocked readers after they reprinted an Onion report on a Neil Armstrong news conference in which the astronaut claimed the 1969 lunar landing was an elaborate hoax.
October 2009. Russian news site Russia.ru shared what it thought was a real video report from the USA: "New Anti-Smoking Ad Warns Teens 'It's Gay to Smoke.' "
February 2010. Newspaper sites in Italy and Norway confused readers when they posted Onion video clips claiming "Denmark Introduces Harrowing New Tourism Ads Directed By Lars Von Trier," the Danish director known for such disturbing films as Antichrist.
September 2010. Viewers of a popular Hong Kong television show were perturbed to learn, courtesy of The Onion, "Justin Bieber Found To Be Cleverly Disguised 51-Year-Old Pedophile."
November 2010. Fox News' website Fox Nation hopped on a story about President Obama writing a 75,000 word e-mail complaining about America, later amending the piece to include a description of The Onion after readers pointed outthe story's satirical roots.
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