Jon Stewart's announcement that he will be returning to The Daily Show will likely provide a ratings boost for the Comedy Central mainstay, which has seen its ratings suffer a marked dip in the years since his departure.
On Wednesday, the Paramount Global network announced that Stewart had been drafted in to host the show on Monday from February 12 through the 2024 election cycle. With a variety of Daily Show correspondents hosting between Tuesday and Thursday, Stewart is also expected to helm the program behind the scenes.
"Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central's The Daily Show to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season," Chris McCarthy, president/CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios, said in a statement.
"In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit," McCarthy added.
Making an announcement on X, formerly Twitter, Stewart quipped that he had "decided to enter the transfer portal for my last year of eligibility."
The announcement that The Daily Show's prodigal son is returning comes almost a decade after his 2015 departure. Stewart hosted the show from 1999 for a 16-year reign that saw it enjoy its highest ratings to date and transformed political commentary.
He was succeeded by Trevor Noah, whose subsequent departure in December 2022 has seen The Daily Show go through a plethora of guest hosts while trying to find a permanent replacement, not dissimilar to the post-Alex Trebek era of Jeopardy!.
While Stewart's return to the fold does represent a steadying of the ship, it also marks unchartered territory for the TV personality, who will all but be expected to work ratings miracles on well-trodden and familiar ground. However, while he riffs about the expected showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, he will do so in a late-night TV landscape that has changed dramatically since 2015.
In the year 2015, as Stewart did the previously unthinkable and departed The Daily Show, the late-night TV world went through an across-the-board change. In the same year that Noah took over, Stephen Colbert replaced David Letterman on NBC's The Late Show, while James Corden stepped in following Craig Ferguson's exit from CBS' The Late Late Show.
A healthy 3.47 million viewers tuned in to watch Noah's premiere episode as The Daily Show host in September 2015, per Variety, giving the comedian numbers that were on par with Stewart's final episode a month prior.
The Daily Show went to average 1.1 million viewers that year. However, it was unable to escape an industry-wide decline in ratings. In August 2022, The Wrap reported that it was averaging just 383,000 viewers, underperforming against network late-night rivals and, importantly, against its own previous figures.
Changing Landscape
It could be seen as though The Daily Show was the problem in the ratings dip it has experienced over the years, though such an assertion would be inaccurate. Late-night talk shows are no longer the glowing bastions of television that tuck the nation into bed by the multimillions throughout the week.
Going as far back as 1995, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show successor Jay Leno pulled in 5.8 million nightly viewers, while rival Letterman averaged 4.7 million, according to reports by The Wall Street Journal at the time.
Almost two decades later, the TV consumption culture has changed in a major way, with viewers heading to streaming platforms to watch snippets of late-night talk shows at times that better suit them. Rather than sit through an hour-long show on the wrong side of midnight, viewers can head to the program's YouTube channel, where the highlights are often uploaded soon after airing on linear TV.
Late-night TV shows have good reason to grow their online audiences. In July 2022, Nielsen reported that streaming viewership had outstripped that of cable for the first time ever. Solidifying the new direction, a study from Leichtman Research Group found that 4.7 million consumers ditched their cable or satellite subscriptions in 2021.
This has all translated into a measurable loss of cold, hard cash. In 2022, The Daily Show commanded around $39.9 million in advertising dollars, Variety reported, citing figures from ad spending tracker Vivvix. When 2023's figures are published, they're expected to show a dip to just under $19 million. Part of this loss can be attributed to the months-long writers and actors strikes that shut down much of Hollywood last year. While rivals ran repeats during this time, Comedy Central opted not to.
Regardless, streaming has greatly altered the talk-show landscape. The Daily Show's YouTube channel currently has 10.5 million subscribers, up by 400,000 since September 2022.
Previous Project
While Stewart's return to The Daily Show marks a boost for the program, the TV personality's most recent project is evidence that his name alone does not guarantee ratings gold.
After two seasons, Stewart and Apple TV+ in October 2023 agreed to end his talk show, The Problem with Jon Stewart. According to The New York Times, the parting of ways came to be amid creative differences between the entities.
An article published by The Hollywood Reporter in November stated that there had been tensions between Stewart and the tech giant over some of the topics that he wanted to cover, including issues concerning China and artificial intelligence.
Whatever the issue, the ratings were not aligned with a star of Stewart's standing. Citing figures from analytics firm Samba TV, The Wrap reported in April 2022 that by the fifth episode of The Problem's first season, just 40,000 were turning in for the weekly show. By comparison, former Daily Show correspondent John Oliver has pulled in 844,000 viewers that same week on HBO's Last Week Tonight.
Cementing the issue, The Problem also failed to find a large online audience. As of press time, the show's YouTube channel has just over 1.3 million subscribers.
Stewart's return to The Daily Show will provide him a familiar outlet through which to tackle the subjects of the day. It will also give audiences a front-row seat to see if Stewart is the man who can give the show a much-needed Midas touch.
Oliver was making an appearance on NBC's Today when news of Stewart's return to The Daily Show broke on Wednesday.
"I mean, that's, that is a surprise," Oliver said in reaction, before expressing anticipation of what's to come. "That's a show that needs a host. He certainly is a very, very good one. So yeah, it'll be exciting to see what he does."
Uncommon Knowledge
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About the writer
Ryan Smith is a Newsweek Senior Pop Culture and Entertainment Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on ... Read more
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