This story ran in Buffering, Vulture’s newsletter about the streaming industry. Head to vulture.com/buffering and subscribe today!
No one needs to echo the Fox News framing of his role on television.
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images
Last week, there was a brief news cycle about Fox News talking head and self-styled “comedian” Greg Gutfeld appearing as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. I’m loath to extend what was a relatively trivial discourse, but one aspect of it needled me, so I touched on it in my Buffering newsletter yesterday. Think what you will of Fallon welcoming a far-right ideologue on to his program — and then not challenging him on even one of his many past contemptible remarks. What actually irks me more is the way in which so many media outlets (even my own) continue to accept the Fox News framing of Gutfeld as a very successful combatant in what’s left of the late-night wars. He absolutely is not.
Don’t misunderstand: There is a late-night vibe to Gutfeld’s self-titled Fox News talk show, especially if your reference point is Politically Incorrect. Like Bill Maher’s old ABC program, Gutfeld cracks jokes every night (or, at least, says a lot of things he thinks are funny), welcomes an ever-changing panel of talking heads from the worlds of media and politics, and does all this in front of a studio audience. It’s nowhere near the same format as Stephen Colbert or the Jimmys, but neither was Later With Bob Costas or, for that matter, The Daily Show. Late-night TV contains multitudes, and has for decades.
But when covering the business of late night — things like how much ad revenue a show generates, what kind of guest bookings it gets, and, most fundamentally, its ratings — there’s something else that matters: When a show actually airs. In the TV business, late night begins when ratings giant Nielsen says prime time ends — i.e., at 11 p.m. in the Eastern and Pacific time zones, 10 p.m. Central/Mountain. And by that very important, definitional metric, Gutfeld! simply cannot be considered a rival to actual late-night shows like Tonight or Stephen Colbert’s soon-to-be-late Late Show: Since July 2023, Fox News has aired Gutfeld! every weeknight at 10 p.m. ET; 7 p.m. for viewers on the West Coast.
This isn’t about semantics, or, as I’m sure Gutfeld might argue, some sort of liberal rage aimed at a right-wing personality drawing more viewers than Trump-bashing Colbert and Kimmel. It’s about fundamental Nielsen logic and fairness. Advertisers, network executives, and the reporters who cover television would never judge the ratings for Fallon or Seth Meyers’s Late Night against the audience for the 10 p.m. Friday hour of Dateline because they all understand that there are far more people watching TV in prime time than when those other shows air. For that matter, nobody judges the audience for the network morning news shows against their evening news counterparts because, even though they both cover news, they’re different formats and very different time slots.
Gutfeld! is a prime-time show in late-night drag.
Even within late night, 11:35 p.m. shows like Colbert and Fallon are held to a different standard than 12:37 a.m. programs, which end in the wee hours of the morning. Ditto the numbers for the handful of weekly shows over the year that have aired in prime time, such as Samantha Bee’s old 10:30 p.m. TBS half-hour or Maher’s long-running 10 p.m. Friday HBO show. Gutfeld is able to post bigger numbers than the more traditional late-night shows because there’s a much bigger available audience — particularly on the West Coast, where his show airs during one of the most heavily viewed hours of the day. (There are many reasons Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! still get big ratings, but one is because they air from 7 to 8 p.m. in much of the country.)
So why have some of my media colleagues accepted the Fox News framing about Gutfeld, the would-be late-night king? Well, I suspect one reason is because earlier in his career, Gutfeld was a late-night host. His first Fox News show, Red Eye, debuted in 2007 and aired at 3 a.m. ET/midnight PT — firmly in the space. Even when he left Red Eye in 2015 to launch his weekly Saturday-night program, The Greg Gutfeld Show (which morphed into the more enthusiastically-titled, Monday-Friday Gutfeld! in 2021), his shtick was still seen at 11 p.m. ET, which at least on the East Coast qualified it as late night (even if comparisons to the network shows became suspect at this point since such a big chunk of the live audience, i.e., everyone west of the Rockies, was watching at 8 p.m.). But once Fox opted to schedule Gutfeld’s show in the 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT slot in 2023, the argument was officially settled: It was no longer a participant in the battle for late-night eyeballs. It was now a primetime player.
The thing is, Gutfeld and Fox News really ought to be celebrating the show’s day-part shift because Gutfeld! actually is a massive hit. In the second quarter of 2025, his show managed to improve upon its 9 p.m. lead-in, Hannity, and while it was by just a few thousand viewers, that’s still rare in the Fox News universe. Gutfeld!’s overall audience last quarter of 3 million viewers also doubled or tripled that of everything on MSNBC other than The Rachel Maddow Show, earned six times the audience of CNN fare, and regularly beat the same-day Nielsen numbers for many entertainment shows on Fox’s broadcast network.
Despite this success story, it’s not hard to figure out why Fox News prefers to keep calling Gutfeld! a late-night show. Doing so lets it push the notion that its renegade right-wing bad boy is whupping the butt of the left-leaning network old guard in late night. It’s another way to own the libs and grab a win in the culture wars, something Fox News leadership prizes nearly as much as ratings and ad dollars. And it’s a rhetorical flourish that allows the network to maximize its universe of “No. 1” shows (something all networks are guilty of). But while Gutfeld himself is free to identify however he wants, the fact remains: Gutfeld! is a prime-time show in late-night drag.