Virginia Heffernan The Medium Television Internet Video Media The Onion

The Onion News Network, a video series produced by the Onion fake-news empire, made a low-key debut a year ago. A near-perfect facsimile of a deadly serious cable broadcast, it brazenly courted brand confusion with CNN. A graphic display in glinting shades of steel introduced a commanding anchorman, rouged correspondents and no trace of bad-comedy wackiness.

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Just as network news was trying to refashion itself as lighter and more fun, ONN emphasized vintage voice-of-god journalism, promising a ferocious approach to world events that would be “faster, harder, scarier and all-knowing.” The network’s first segment profiled an 0,000-a-year business executive who lost his job to a Mexican immigrant willing to work for 0,000. “Two thumbs way up!” said The Inland Echo of Spokane, Wash. I wrote something just as effusive. Earlier this month, ONN was nominated for four Webbys, the Internet’s highest (official) honor for excellence.

No one has panned the Onion News Network. Of course not. America has inexhaustible reserves of good will for the homespun Onion, which started as a print weekly in Wisconsin in 1988, as it does for no other national comedy institution except maybe Mark Twain. “The Simpsons” is past its prime. “The Daily Show” is admired but partisan. And each incarnation of “Saturday Night Live” bugs its audience in a new way. The Onion, though, is like overwork or pizza. It’s your patriotic duty to not not like it.

But in a laid-back way, The Onion is also a bully — hefty, hungry, hard on weirdos. Midwestern humor machines (Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Bob Newhart) have always styled themselves as conflict-averse, while also conveying that their fight is with the whole damn thing. Business, politics, scholarship, medicine, technology, nature, celebrity and virtually anything enshrined in print or on screen serves only to obscure a home truth: everybody is vain, venal, pleasure-loving and pain-fleeing.

On ONN, actors with wonderfully off-kilter appearances play the smarmy prigs that parade through cable news: spokesmen, ambassadors, consultants, people on the street. The spokesmen enunciate in a firm, value-neutral way, as if auditioning for legitimate jobs in the industry. They all seem convincingly unaware that what they’re playing is comedy. The false news stories manage to seem plausible in a dangerous, “War of the Worlds” way, coming across as only slightly distorted versions of the clichés that appear all day on CNN and Fox News.

In one segment, the Food and Drug Administration, represented by an exhausted and concerned-looking official at a lectern, stages an urgent Class I product recall of “piping hot” potpies and asks that they be delivered to the F.D.A. headquarters — to the attention of the F.D.A. panel conference room. In another, a Chinese ambassador crows over China’s status as the world’s No. 1 polluter, his diction combining Confucius and Mao (“The labor of the people made the sky black with the smoke of progress”). And in a segment that’s too sad to laugh at, a pudgy single woman appreciates the streamlined process of heartbreak and rejection on Match.com, which might, a reporter approvingly summarizes, “distract her from killing herself.” The Onion’s bellowed instruction to America is to give up and stop pretending to have hope.

By contrast, fancy, coastal visual comedy — “30 Rock,” “The Sarah Silverman Program,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — has a strongly aspirational element to it, with protagonists mired in what Joni Mitchell once called rich people’s problems (real estate, restaurants, relationships). They comparison-shop values like consumerism and thinness, glamour and goodness, Obama and Clinton.

The Onion shrugs at these choices. Indifferent and impassive before overblown moral showdowns, The Onion offers only contempt, impotence and blank depression. ONN’s producer, Will Graham, has said he wanted The Onion’s first video foray to be “sinister.” And indeed it is, painting TV news as driven less by bimbos than by mentally ill martinets. After 20 years and various media incarnations, The Onion still displays the attitude of a sidelined teenager who sees no percentage in any of the great human sweepstakes. He has an unbreakable heart. “F.D.A. Approves Napalm Breast Implants.” “Army Holds Annual ‘Bring Your Daughter to War’ Day.” “New Abortion Bill to Require Fetal Consent.”

Despite its foray into sketch comedy, The Onion’s big strength is still the one-liner. What would have been newspaper headlines in the print Onion turn up on ONN in the crawl that marches along the bottom of the screen (“Poll: global warming tops list of issues voters say they would most like to care about”). These concise, declarative, article-free statements of human activity can, in their point-blankness, suggest gross inhumanity, deafness to that inhumanity and thus spirals of existential despair.

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