Do We Need Another Fox Crime Show?

We have The Lineup with Kimberly Guilfoyle. We have Geraldo At Large. We see scandalous, cringe-inducing crime stories on cable almost every hour of every day. Do we really need another crime show produced by Fox News? (Pretend, for a moment, that Nancy Grace and Rita Cosby and Court TV don’t exist.)

Yesterday, execs said Fox News would produce a magazine called “On Scene” for My Network TV. The WP says the program was described as “coverage of the crimes you need to see to believe.”

But isn’t that what At Large and The Lineup are supposed to cover? Do we need ANOTHER crime show? Of course it’ll deliver viewers — but doesn’t anyone feel a little bit uncomfortable about exploiting true-life tragedies for ratings?

> Update: 10:17am: An e-mailer says: “Programming costs money, and that would throw the budgets at Ailes’ TV station group totally out of whack. So they produce something cheap and easy (crime shows), fill holes in their station schedules, and if they can sell it to other owners who face the same problem, they can recoup their costs and maybe make a few bucks. Do we need more of this crap on the air? No, but it is cheap and easy to produce, it doesn’t have to be very good, and it will generate ratings competitive with what’s going away. And that explains why television today is as mediocre as it is.”

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