Hannity &—Oh, Who Are We Kidding?

After the end of the year, Alan Colmes will not provide a spirited defense of liberalism to Sean Hannity on Hannity & Colmes. Unlike for the past 12 years, the reason will now be that Colmes is not on the show. 

Fox News has announced that the often-outshouted left half of the cable debate show will be leaving Hannity & Colmes at the end of the year. And TV Decoder is reporting that Colmes may not replaced, with Hannity—whom Fox recently signed to a rich new deal—possibly taking the show solo instead. 

The move is the latest in a series of deals at Fox News recently: the network also re-signed Bill O'Reilly and its chief Roger Ailes, while bringing over Glenn Beck from CNN Headline News. The Hannity and O'Reilly sign-ups make sense for Fox, expensive as they are, in that they allow the network to hang on to what are still its two biggest draws. But beyond holding down its base, I'll be especially interested in what the network does to change and cultivate new talent in the coming months. 

Fox remains the number one cable network in sheer ratings, but it's no longer pulling ahead of CNN and MSNBC by leaps and bounds like it did earlier in the decade. CNN saw big gains during the election, while MSNBC has made gains among younger viewers (who draw more cash from advertisers) in the past year.

As I wrote earlier this spring, Fox faces a challenge as it goes into a new administration. By that, I don't mean, "the country's getting less conservative, therefore people will stop watching Fox." (That's irrelevant. Fox gained under Clinton; it gained under Bush.) Rather, it's always a danger for a network, once it becomes successful and identified with a certain era—in this case, the Bush / war-on-terror era, when it became #1—to keep offering the same thing without bringing new faces into the mix. And Fox News (for admittedly understandable reasons) has had a very stable lineup for a very long time. 

FNC will hate this comparison, but think of CNN toward the end of the '90s: it had been king ever since the Gulf War, but by the end of the Clinton administration, it felt staid and on autopilot—and Fox soon blew past it. Conversely, look at MTV, which stayed on top for years—in a very fickle youth market—because it realized that the time to change is precisely when you're on top, before your competitors start to gain on you, before it's too late. 

Whatever the channel does or doesn't, though, it'll now have to do it without Alan Colmes to kick around.