Is Jon Stewart Still the Right Person to Host ‘The Daily Show?’

Alan Sepinwall
·7 min read
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Jon Stewart. - Credit: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images
Jon Stewart. - Credit: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images

Whenever a popular sitcom or drama from years ago tries to come back, I worry. The series that we love are so often a product of a specific moment in time for the people who make them, the characters on them, and the people watching. Change that moment, things start to feel wrong, and can even leave the audience questioning why they liked the original run in the first place.

The Daily Show isn’t exactly like those kinds of shows, though the hosts and correspondents work with scripted jokes, and often play exaggerated characters. And it’s also been on the air, in one form or another, for nearly 30 years. But tonight brings as high-profile a revival as TV has seen in a minute, with the return of the series’ most famous incarnation, as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

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But what should feel like a triumph instead feels kind of sad, for both Stewart and The Daily Show itself.

From the time he succeeded Craig Kilborn in 1998 through the time Bruce Springsteen closed out his farewell episode in 2015, Stewart had about as sterling a reputation as there is in the comedy business, and to a weird degree in the news business. Though The Daily Show was meant to be a parody of cable news, over Stewart’s tenure the actual versions began to feel so much like self-parody that many younger viewers began treating Stewart as their primary news source. Media writers, too: in 2004, the Television Critics Association gave its Outstanding Achievement in News and Information Award to Stewart over 60 Minutes, Nightline, and other traditional news stalwarts. He delivered an appropriately incredulous acceptance speech.

Night after night, Stewart took a scalpel to the hypocrisy and double talk of the people he was covering, whether they were newsmakers or people who claimed to just report the news. He wore his heart on his sleeve, struggling to get through his first episode after 9/11, and closing that show by putting a puppy on his desk, as the only thing he could think of to lift his and his audience’s spirits in that dark moment. He was, to so many passionate viewers, a calming, sensible voice in an increasingly irrational political and media landscape.

In 2015, Stewart stepped down from the job. He was understandably exhausted from doing four shows a week for nearly two decades. But there was also a sense that his moment had passed. Among the core tenets of Stewart’s Daily Show was that both sides of the aisle — in Congress and on cable — weren’t really to be trusted, and that America’s biggest problem had become our inability to stop yelling at one another. This was crystallized in 2010’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” which Stewart and Daily Show graduate Stephen Colbert hosted on the National Mall.

Stewart left The Daily Show in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, when the whole idea still seemed like a joke. (Replaying the footage of Trump descending an escalator to announce his candidacy seemed to provide Stewart as much delight as any running gag in his time hosting.) He likely couldn’t have imagined what would happen in the 2016 election, never mind what was to come over the next four years, where the sheer tonnage of falsehoods being proudly uttered in the White House could have allowed The Daily Show to expand each episode to three hours without running out of material. But even amidst all that mendaciousness, the push toward racism and fascism, or the sheer incompetence displayed by so many people in so many important positions affecting the lives of every American, Stewart was still sticking with the same Both Sides Are Equally Bad approach, which was on display again in Irresistible, the toothless 2020 political satire he directed.

In the fall of 2021, Stewart came back to TV with The Problem with Jon Stewart, a weekly show that borrowed many of The Daily Show’s trappings, but as a weekly, less-timely, newsmagazine-style series. He did some good work there, once again demonstrating his ability to ask much better and more relentless follow-up questions of politicians than “real” reporters tend to. But in a world where Daily Show alums like John Oliver and Samantha Bee were already doing similar, excellent series, it was hard for The Problem to make much of a splash. And eventually, Stewart walked away when Apple began interfering in decisions about what stories could and couldn’t be covered.

But in a world where Daily Show alums like John Oliver and Samantha Bee were already doing similar, excellent, series, it was hard for The Problem to make much of a splash.

The Daily Show, meanwhile, moved on with Stewart’s hand-picked successor, Trevor Noah, who held the job until he surprised his corporate bosses by announcing that he’d be leaving the job in 2022. Noah’s Daily Show had its own strengths, gradually built up a strong stable of correspondents like Roy Wood Jr., and even won an Emmy for its final season. But it was dismissed by some for the crime of not being exactly like the Stewart incarnation, and also hurt by the increased fracturing of television, the rise of cord-cutting, and the devaluing of traditional linear cable channels like Comedy Central.

With Noah gone, the show spent a year of rotating guest hosts, mixing past and present correspondents like Wood and Hasan Minhaj with celebrity hosts like Leslie Jones, Sarah Silverman, and Kal Penn. Minhaj for a while seemed to have the inside track for the full-time job, but a heavily critical story in The New Yorker put the kibosh on that. Wood Jr. mysteriously dropped out of the running, and while Noah was accepting that Emmy last month, Wood Jr. could be seen mouthing, “Please hire a host.”

That still hasn’t happened, though Comedy Central has settled on a high-profile, temporary solution: starting tonight and running through the election, Stewart will return as host every Monday night, with correspondents helming each week’s other three episodes. It’s a case of mutual needs aligning: Stewart doesn’t have a platform at another potentially huge moment in American history, and The Daily Show somehow hasn’t been able to find a permanent host.

But it’s not a great look for either party, on top of the question of whether Stewart wants to reorient his comedic approach in any way in a year where Trump is dealing with multiple criminal and civil trials, while at the same time having a non-zero chance of being elected president again. And even if returning to his old home reinvigorates both himself and the series, it still creates the problem of what The Daily Show does after. It’s an old cliché that you never want to be the guy who replaces a legend, because it’s better to be the guy who replaces that guy. Trevor Noah ran a good show while always under Jon Stewart’s shadow, which is a problem that his successor wouldn’t have had to deal with. Instead, whoever gets the job will have to do it while Stewart’s work will once again be fresh in everyone’s minds.

Though at this point, maybe there won’t be a new permanent host, because maybe there won’t be a Daily Show any longer. Comedy Central has become an original programming ghost town, with most original product in the corporate family going over to Paramount+. And at a time when so many people now get their news — real and satiric alike — via social media, a polished nightly version of this risks feeling like a relic of a bygone era. If that’s the case, there’s something to be said for going full-circle-ish here. Heck, maybe Stewart’s final guest can be Craig Kilborn?

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