Ten Spot

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 10, 2007 3:06PM

Normally Chicagoist doesn’t watch the local news. We prefer to read our news on paper or online. We find that local news is too garish, too tainted, too … unhealthy; we just stopped watching altogether.

But we were curious to see Fox’s new news show “The Ten.” We got a press release about it that stated that it was a “fast-paced, concise format designed for today’s news viewer.” We’re not even sure what that means, but what we ended up watching was basically The RedEye for television. It felt like a lot of watered-down information, dispensed rapidly for easy digestion.

One of the things we noticed was that it’s weird to see newscasters standing up. We think they should just sit behind a desk, because they look like fledgling actors who aren’t sure what to do with their hands. The other weird thing we noticed is that they really must love Amy Freeze over at Fox. We have never in our lives seen so much weather on a news show. They’d give one piece of information about rogue elephants and then boom, back to Amy Freeze for another look at a forecast she just gave us a minute ago.

We’re not sure why Fox needs another news show at 10:00 p.m. The only thing we could figure out was maybe they’re planning to expand their prime time, and “The Ten” will be their regular newscast?

We didn’t take much away from “The Ten,” but we can say we know what the weather is going to be like for the next 1,404 days.