Almost every weeknight, I turn on CNN Headline News at 7 p.m. for some true entertainment. No, the station is not showing Saturday Night Live reruns. Instead, they are broadcasting the most ridiculous “news” show on television, “Nancy Grace Live.” To those lucky people who have not heard of Nancy Grace, she is a former prosecutor from Georgia who has been on television for the last couple of years, mostly discussing matters of criminal justice on Court TV. But her new show borders on self-parody and high comedy.

For her hour-long show, she manly focuses on missing persons – but not just any type of missing person. She seems to love talking about those young, attractive girls and boys. If a young girl is missing, Grace will be covering it with great intensity and anger. Grace has said that she went to law school and entered the field because her fiance was randomly murdered, but it seems that she went to school to pursue a career in drama-filled plays, judging from her show.

Natalee Holloway, the girl who went missing in Aruba, is one of Grace’s favorite on-going topics. While the rest of the media has long since abandoned the story because there are no compelling breaks in the case, Grace continues to pound the story into the ground with an unintended comedic swagger. Whenever a new home video of Holloway gets released or some photographs get sent to the media, Grace mindlessly blabbers on about Holloway. One specific video shows her in the car with her friends joking about not having their seatbelts on. When Nancy Grace saw this, she looked into the camera, (fake) tears in her eyes, and made a comment about how Holloway was “such a sweet girl that she was scared of breaking the law.” Grace has never even met Holloway, but makes these theatrical performances on her show to drive ratings up. She also continually tells her viewers that the suspects are absolutely guilty and deserve to be in prison.

Another recent case that she has been hyping is the former missing girl, Taylor Behl. While Behl’s body has since been found, Grace’s theatrics have been over the top before and after the discovery. A video of Behl as an infant was released to the press by the family and was shown widely on Grace’s show. Again, Grace activated the waterworks and the trembling voice to say that “Behl had her entire life ahead of her” and that “she looked so happy.” That is some great insight, considering that Behl was playing on a slide. Furthermore, Grace continues to defame the main suspect in the case. In addition to telling her audience that the man is guilty, she questioned his mental state and called him a pervert for having sex toys. If owning a sex toy makes you a pervert, it’s fair to say that our campus is a breeding ground for perverts and sexual deviants.

Grace’s guest experts are jokes as well. She seems to have a number of regulars, each of who have a specific purpose. She has the ones that suck up to her and agree with everything that she says, and she has the whipping boys. In one memorable discussion between Grace, a suck-up and a whipping boy, the whipping boy defended an accused man by saying that they have to wait until all of the facts are out there before he can make an informed decision. Grace countered by telling the whipping boy that he was wrong, and then turned to the suck-up, who vehemently agreed with whatever Grace said.

To top all of this off, she ends her show in a ridiculous manner. Almost every night, she ends her show with the statement, “Goodnight and be safe, friends.” If Grace’s tone were not so sincere, she would seem condescending to all of her viewers.

Grace is a joke to the field of law and only seems to be on television because she gets ratings for acting in such a ridiculous manner. Her show should either be taken off the air or moved to Comedy Central, because it does not belong on a channel that touts journalistic integrity.

Todd Swiss is a senior in LAS. His column runs every Tuesday. He can be reached at [email protected]