![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/cbddf7bb2cdd3529b88d744c2ff9e7f506-buffering-greg-gutfeld.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n This story ran in\u00a0Buffering, Vulture\u2019s newsletter about the streaming industry. Head to\u00a0vulture.com\/buffering<\/a>\u00a0and subscribe today!\n <\/p>\n \n No one needs to echo the Fox News framing of his role on television. Last week, there was a brief news cycle about Fox News talking head and self-styled \u201ccomedian\u201d Greg Gutfeld appearing as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. I\u2019m 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<\/a> on to his program \u2014 and then not challenging him on even one of his many past<\/a> contemptible remarks<\/a>. What actually irks me more is the way in which so many media outlets (even my own) continue to accept the Fox News framing<\/a> of Gutfeld as a very successful combatant in what\u2019s left of the late-night wars. He absolutely is not.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t misunderstand: There is a late-night vibe to Gutfeld\u2019s self-titled Fox News talk show, especially if your reference point is Politically Incorrect. Like Bill Maher\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But when covering the business of late night \u2014 things like how much ad revenue a show generates, what kind of guest bookings it gets, and, most fundamentally, its ratings \u2014 there\u2019s something else that matters: When a show actually airs. In the TV business, late night begins when ratings giant Nielsen says prime time ends \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t about semantics, or, as I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re different formats and very different time slots.<\/p>\n Gutfeld! is a prime-time show in late-night drag.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s old 10:30 p.m. TBS half-hour or Maher\u2019s long-running 10 p.m. Friday HBO show. Gutfeld is able to post bigger numbers than the more traditional late-night shows because there\u2019s a much bigger available audience \u2014 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.)<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The thing is, Gutfeld and Fox News really ought to be celebrating the show\u2019s 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\u2019s still rare in the Fox News universe. Gutfeld!\u2019s 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\u2019s broadcast network.<\/p>\n Despite this success story, it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a rhetorical flourish that allows the network to maximize its universe of \u201cNo. 1\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo: John Lamparski\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n