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It was a day after Bret Baier’s contentious interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Fox News punditocracy on “The Five,” the network’s most popular show, was celebrating. “She’s ice-cold, she’s unlikable, and her arguments are incoherent,” sneered Jesse Watters. “The look and the tone of a D.M.V. clerk who wants to take her break,” scoffed Greg Gutfeld.
But a dissenter was in their midst.
“What Kamala Harris needed to do was to show up, to look tough, to not get rattled,” said Jessica Tarlov, the show’s resident Democrat and one of Ms. Harris’s most outspoken defenders in the cantankerous realm of cable news. She added, “I think she handled herself really well.”
Her co-hosts, avid supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, rolled their eyes. Ms. Tarlov, 40, paid no heed. She told Fox viewers that Mr. Trump was “unstable,” “unfit” and devoid of sympathy. She debunked the network’s usual talking points about a migrant-fueled crime wave, pointing out the national decrease in homicides. And when Mr. Gutfeld claimed that only Republican men were handy around the garage, Ms. Tarlov administered a quick fact check.
“Jesse, can you change a car tire?” she asked.
Mr. Watters laughed: “I have a guy for that.”
The token liberal has long been a stock character of Fox News’s ongoing opéra bouffe. Sean Hannity was paired with Alan Colmes. The lefty chair on “The Five” cycled through Bob Beckel (fired), Juan Williams (transferred) and Geraldo Rivera (who was demoted and then quit).
Few, though, have broken out like Ms. Tarlov, a dish-it-out Democratic strategist with a C.V. that reads like a parody of a Manhattan elitist: prep school at Dalton, a degree from Bryn Mawr, a family loft in TriBeCa and a father who produced movies by the liberal provocateur John Waters. (“Right from the heartland,” she jokes.)
Despite her un-Fox upbringing, Ms. Tarlov has thrived by bursting viewers’ bubbles on a network where pro-Harris voices are scarce. Her exchanges on “The Five” have become a staple of the @KamalaHQ social media account, which the Harris campaign uses to amplify positive media moments for its candidate. The “Pod Save America” guys invited Ms. Tarlov on their podcast. Democratic stars like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California have gone out of their way to say hello when visiting the Fox studios.
She has even managed to stay on cordial terms with the Trump loyalists who try — teasingly, they say — to disparage her views on television on a daily basis. Jeanine Pirro says Ms. Tarlov is “smart as hell,” and they share makeup and jewelry tips. Mr. Hannity, who gave Ms. Tarlov an early break on his prime-time show, calls her “family.” She is on texting terms with Mr. Watters’s mother, a registered Democrat, whose advice for dealing with her son on the air is simple: “Kick him.”
“I’m there to represent, at least of the voting public, the majority of Americans,” Ms. Tarlov said over a recent breakfast. “We” — she meant Democrats in 2020 — “got 81 million votes. There are more of me than there are of them.” Her goal, she said, is to inject a Democratic perspective into the Fox bloodstream, while showing viewers that ideological foes can still get along.
“I also want to win elections,” said Ms. Tarlov, who got her start in politics working for Douglas Schoen, a Democratic pollster. “And I think that being on the most-watched show is the best place to do it.”
Indeed, since Ms. Tarlov became a regular on “The Five” in 2022 — she now shares the liberal chair with Harold Ford Jr., a former House Democrat — the program has remained the undisputed top draw in all of cable news, watched by a bigger audience than even Fox’s prime-time stars.
‘He knows how to hurt you.’
All that exposure has caught the eye of right-wing critics — Mr. Trump among them. This month, the former president included “Jessica Tarloff?” in his list of “Harris Radical Left Democrat mouthpieces” who, he contended, had tainted the network. (“FoxNews has totally lost its way!”)
It was not the first time Ms. Tarlov earned his ire. In 2023, Mr. Trump watched a “Five” segment and issued this scathing verdict: “Her jittery presentation is horrendous and, forgive me, her VOICE is grating and unendurable.”
“He knows how to hurt you,” Ms. Tarlov said of the former president. “He did it overnight, so I woke up to all of that on my phone, and it obviously invites a ton of horrific people into your Twitter life.”
Shaken, she turned to Ms. Pirro, a longtime Trump friend, for advice. “I showed it to her, and I was like, ‘This is garbage,’ and she was like, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry,’” Ms. Tarlov recalled.
Ms. Tarlov, who posts regularly to her more than 211,000 followers on X, conceded that the criticism could be unsettling. “If you look at my Twitter feed, it’s a complete cesspool,” she said. The other day, when she posted that she would appear on Mr. Baier’s newscast, one user replied, “Jessica is a terrible person and a DEMON.”
Sometimes, her mother — Judith Roberts, a screenwriter who wrote the 1999 Sarah Michelle Gellar rom-com, “Simply Irresistible,” which was directed by her now-deceased father, Mark Tarlov — sends a concerned text message to check if she’s OK.
Ms. Tarlov, who gave birth to her second daughter in April, said her husband, Brian McKenna, a hedge fund executive, had never watched cable news before they met as next-door neighbors during the pandemic.
“He honestly thinks it’s all play,” she said of the vicious messages she receives. “And sometimes I wonder if it is.”
As the designated outlier of “The Five,” Ms. Tarlov skews farther left than predecessors like Mr. Rivera, who for a while openly supported Mr. Trump. But her more liberal views, rather than turning off viewers, seem to have sharpened the show’s edges and provided her conservative co-hosts with a useful foil.
“I like to pretend that I’m angry at her,” Mr. Gutfeld said. “She knows I’m a prankster. She knows Jesse is a knucklehead. But we both really, really like her, and she likes us.”
Brit Hume, the Fox News political analyst, observed that the most successful TV panel shows provided viewers with a reliable cast of characters to choose from.
“People tune in to watch people they love to love,” he said, “and people they love to hate.”
‘How dare you kink-shame?’
The six-story Lower Manhattan loft where Ms. Tarlov grew up was originally the home of a Bazzini Nuts factory. Her parents regularly pulled her and her younger sister out of school to travel to film sets, including in South Africa and New Zealand. After college, Ms. Tarlov moved to Britain, where she earned a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics and worked on Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign. Back in New York, she landed a job with Mr. Schoen’s firm after her grandparents approached the pollster at the Harmonie Club, on the Upper East Side, and talked up their bright granddaughter.
Mr. Schoen, who was a longtime Fox News contributor, was impressed with Ms. Tarlov’s communications skills, and began recommending her to bookers at the network. “Whenever I would critique her work, she would smile and come back at me, so I knew she would be a natural,” he said. Along the way, Ms. Tarlov became head of research at Bustle Digital Group, a female-focused online news outlet created by the founder of Bleacher Report.
When Mr. Trump won the presidency in 2016, “it was the lowest I’ve ever felt politically,” Ms. Tarlov said. She was concerned that media coverage had left Democrats unprepared for Mr. Trump’s shock victory, which she said continued to motivate her work on Fox News.
Except for the MAGA die-hards, she hopes that when Fox viewers “see a reasonable and data-driven representative of the left who can also get along with their colleagues, that makes them sit up and listen,” she told “Pod Save America.”
Her fans now include the film director Quentin Tarantino, who first spotted Ms. Tarlov during one of her appearances on Bill Maher’s talk show on HBO.
“Even the existence of this one person is an interesting thing to me,” Mr. Tarantino said on Mr. Maher’s podcast. “They put her on their big show, and she says what she says against the Fox audience, and against the panel.” He added, “As far as I can see, that is the hardest job on television.”
The other co-hosts “all kind of like her, so they don’t go ballistic on her,” Mr. Tarantino continued, before asking: “How come there isn’t that person on MSNBC?”
Indeed, MSNBC does not employ a counterpart to Ms. Tarlov — a conservative who takes on the network’s many liberal stars — on any of its marquee opinion shows.
And the moments where she punctures the limits of Fox’s often-closed information environment can be striking.
In September, Ms. Tarlov announced on the air to her “Five” co-hosts that Mark Robinson, the Trump-endorsed lieutenant governor of North Carolina, had been caught posting on a porn site, “expressed support for reinstating slavery and detailed his sexual arousal from memories of peeping on women in public gyms.” When Mr. Gutfeld tried to defuse the tension with a joke — “How dare you kink-shame?” — Ms. Tarlov did not give ground.
“That’s a great reaction,” she deadpanned, adding, “This, again, is evidence of the type of candidates that Donald Trump thinks are good for the country.”
The panel did not return to the subject of Mr. Robinson, and Fox News barely touched on the scandal over the next several days.
Ms. Tarlov’s on-air balancing act has created some unlikely acolytes. In July, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, several admirers approached Ms. Tarlov as she made her way from a Fox News studio back to her dressing room. One was Ellie Cohanim, who served as a special envoy to combat antisemitism in the Trump administration.
On social media, Ms. Cohanim is an avid Trump ally who has accused Ms. Harris of “treachery” against the country. In person, she gushed over Ms. Tarlov, saying, “I adore her.”
“I think it’s incredibly important to have the other viewpoint on Fox,” Ms. Cohanim said. “It makes it harder for us to have a national conversation when people are just not hearing both sides of the argument.”
Then she turned to Ms. Tarlov with a request: “Do you mind if I take a selfie?”
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