Channel Surfing: Faking It With \'Newsreaders\'

In the narrow programming niche of 15-minute late-night television comedies, there is a handful of auteurs: Seth Green (“Robot Chicken”), Jon Glaser (“Delocated”) and Rob Corddry (“Children’s Hospital”). Their faces pop up before midnight â€" Mr. Corddry on “Ben and Kate,” Mr. Glaser on “Parks and Recreation,” Mr. Green, reunited with his “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” co-star Alyson Hannigan, on a recent episode of “How I Met Your Mother” â€" but in the wee hours they’re nobody’s guest star.

And Mr. Corddry’s short-form empire will expand at 11:59 p.m. Thursday on Adult Swim with the premiere of “Newsreaders,” which he created with his “Children’s Hopital” collaborators Jonathan Stern and David Wain. A parody of TV newsmagazines, it will be supervised by Jim Margolis, whose experience with TV news parodies includes producer credits on more than 1,000 episodes of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”

“Newsreaders” is a very tangential spinoff of “Children’s Hospital,” focused on an occasional character from that show, the smug TV host Louis La Fonda (Mather Zickel). The two shows share a writing and performing style that is simultaneously over the top and dryly understated, as well as a funny quirk of showing us enticing excerpts of scenes or segments that don’t exist. The best part of the “Newsreaders” premiere is a short teaser in which Dan Rather talks about his second career in Southern rap: “It turns out Bone Crusher, Bun B and I share an agent. The rest, as I say in my song ‘Fat Man to the 404,’ is history.”

Television has been making fun of its own news shows for d! ecades, though, and while “Newsreaders” has its moments, it’s less fresh and inventive than its sister show. “Children’s Hospital” shoehorns surprisingly intricate stories and a large cast of talented comedians into its 11.5 minutes (after commercials); “Newsreaders,” formatted like a single segment of a newsmagazine show, mostly elaborates on one central joke and is dominated by the polished but so far not particularly distinctive performance of Mr. Zickel.

The funnier of Thursday night’s two episodes is the first, detailing how the domestic auto industry has been revived by a series of online sex videos filmed in the backs of American-made vans. The satire of the breathlessness and cluelessness of newsmagazines is pretty limp (“Ethan and Micha’s videos spread like â€" a viral Internt video”), but some sharp writing peeks through. La Fonda interviews a man (Brian Posehn of “The Sarah Silverman Program”) who has filed a lawsuit after buying a van failed to lead to sex: “None of the girls would even get into the van, let alone take their top off and do stuff.” “So, here you are, stuck with a lemon.” In passing, La Fonda intones, “Like Apple Computer and Jesus, another successful business was born in a garage.” With a few little bombs like that, 15 minutes passes quickly enough.