The Problem With Jon Stewart’s new talk show might be his own tremendous shadow
It’s good to see Jon Stewart back on TV, even if he’s no longer a trailblazer.
TV Reviews Jon Stewart
If you were to ask any major talk show host during the mid-1990s who their single biggest influence was, they would likely say one name: Johnny Carson. A decade later, it was probably David Letterman. However, today that name is very likely Jon Stewart, whose 16-year run on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show took the superficial format of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” and elevated it beyond simple fake news and pop culture references.
Four nights a week, Stewart delivered incisive satirical commentary about the very real political issues impacting the world. Four former Daily Show correspondents now host their own talk shows that each bear Stewart’s mark in some way: Stephen Colbert (The Late Show), John Oliver (Last Week Tonight), Samantha Bee (Full Frontal), and his eventual Daily Show successor Trevor Noah. Former Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac hosted Problem Areas in 2018 (Stewart has acknowledged the similarity in titles).
That’s a tremendous legacy on its own, but it doesn’t end there: Seth Meyers (Late Night) might’ve hosted Weekend Update for years, but his regular “Closer Look” segments are more like The Daily Show than Letterman’s old Viewer Mail bits.
Stewart left The Daily Show in 2015 at the top of his game. Now, he’s returned with a new Apple TV+ series, which premieres September 30. The open credits cycle through several potential titles (The Money Grab With Jon Stewart, The Monthly Show With Jon Stewart, The Trouble With Jon Stewart) before settling on The Problem With Jon Stewart, but the cold open makes it clear there’s no actual confusion about the show Stewart wants to create.
Seated at a table during a producers meeting, Stewart explicitly lays out the format—monologue that introduces this week’s “problem,” then an interview segment devoted to those the problem directly impacts, followed by an interview with someone important who could possibly help.
The intro also reveals the faces of the people working with Stewart, and it’s a sharp contrast to his notoriously white male staff on The Daily Show, which he said he regretted in an interview last year on The Breakfast Club. Stewart has made good on what he described as an obligation to “actively dismantle” a discriminatory system. The show’s head writer, Chelsea Devantez, is a woman, and the executive producer, Brinda Adhikari, is a woman of color. And she’s not alone! This is a refreshing change.
In his last episode on The Daily Show, Stewart declared the world “demonstrably worse than when I started this!” This wasn’t entirely hyperbole or (in my case) Gen-X nostalgia speaking. Stewart took over from original host Craig Kilborn in 1999. Bill Clinton was still in office, and the Supreme Court hadn’t yet installed George W. Bush in the White House. Then came 9/11 and the Iraq War. Donald Trump wasn’t yet president when Stewart quit, but he was no longer the obvious punchline Stewart had assumed when he’d walked down that escalator in June 2015.
Stewart told Charlie Rose in 1997 that the key to his comedy was recognizing life’s absurdities. But the Trump era, arguably still ongoing, wasn’t simply absurd. It was devastatingly real. Stewart admirably doesn’t try to return to a simpler milieu. He seems focused on making the change he wants to see in the world.
That said, the first “problem” Stewart tackles is familiar terrain—the country’s shoddy treatment of its military veterans. Stewart has advocated on behalf of 9/11 first responders, who suffered from the long-term effects of a terrorist attack, but these Iraq War veterans are victims of not-so-friendly fire. They were exposed to toxic fumes from what’s known as “burn pits,” where U.S. military contractors dumped trash and set it aflame with jet fuel. “Trash” is too benign a word. The pits contained piles of human feces and random body parts. There are veterans still dying from cancer, but the government would prefer to bury them as well, claiming that there’s no proven link between otherwise healthy young men who now struggle to breathe or have been driven to attempted suicide from their chronic pain.
This isn’t funny material, obviously, but Stewart is too personally invested to make the first segment’s few jokes land. Here, the show does not quite meet the standard set by John Oliver’s deep dives on a topic that are informative yet never less than hilarious. Amber Ruffin is also able to deliver “Schoolhouse Rock”-style studies on racism that still manage to leave you laughing. Stewart struggles with this balance to the extent he actually tries (the few overt efforts fall flat).
The Problem With Jon Stewart is ultimately more advocacy than activism, and while that’s consistent with Stewart’s past work, it lacks bite. Our current political climate is so absurd that even actual news anchors, such as MSNBC’s Brian Williams and CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper, frequently have satirical segments where they perform more like Stewart than the stiff, buttoned-up Walter Cronkite wannabes parodied on “Weekend Update” and the original Daily Show with Craig Kilborn. They exist in a post-Stewart reality. The challenge for Stewart is whether he can truly thrive in the world he’s created.
Stray observations
- The interview segments were never my favorite part of Stewart’s Daily Show. This episode’s interview with Denis R. McDonough is awkward, and unfortunately, McDonough, who seems well-meaning, comes off like Martin Short’s shady businessman in a 60 Minutes spoof on Saturday Night Live. That was funny, of course. This isn’t.
- It seems even more impressive now that John Oliver can keep my attention on a single subject for 30 minutes.
- I know it seems like an odd criticism given The Daily Show format, but Stewart could really use someone to banter with on the show.
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Political comedy hasn’t done anything for me since Trump got elected, and I think it’s because it’s just not working. Republicans have stopped caring about being perceived as hypocritical and such, so the ol’ “So-And-So said this today, but said this in 2006″ standby doesn’t affect them. That, and basically everybody and their cousin was doing political comedy. Like, Jon was really the only game in town for awhile, but now basically every late night host has upped their game on this and every other TDS correspondent got their own show. It’s just too much.
Absolutely correct. This medium exists to give people the impression that they are political actors by consuming certain media and having certain opinions.Now that this genre of broadcasting has achieved some success it has created imitators, thus lessening the perceived impact of the original show and therefore debasing the format generally.
What’s really interesting about this is that, if you told me in, say 2013, that in 2021 the least effective/funny political comedians would be Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, I wouldn’t have believed you.
The thing for me is: as much as there’s a tendency for us all to high-five about how stupid the other side is, or how stupid the political situation at large is, pretty much all ‘political’ comedy at the moment is less sophisticated than audiences are. It’s formulaic and at that, it uses a formula and an approach that doesn’t really capture the popular mood or the tone of the popular attitude. The comedy mostly derives from how cleverly the joke writer has devised a new way of saying “can you believe that?”
Agreed. Plus our politics have become legitimately terrifying to the point where very little of it lends itself to comedy anymore. It’s just such a different environment since 2016. During the Bush years there was Stewart and Olbermann and Moyers, and the rest of the media was jingoistic credulous trash. Then the strange waking dream of the Obama years, the overwhelming complacency that obviously the bad guys were losing, and Stewart’s schtick was a highly entertaining look at what we assumed were their unhinged death rattles. Trump’s election was such a violent end to that fantasy and we still haven’t recovered from it. I was enjoying Samantha Bee all the way through the ‘16 campaign but after Election Night things just got way too real way too fast. Can’t stomach the format anymore. (It also doesn’t help that Trevor Noah is profoundly unfunny.)
Disagree here from an international perspective. It’s much more entertaining when things are going to shit in America as a consequence of your actions. When you actually elect sane people, political comedy goes to shit. The Obama era was death to political comedy just as much as the Tr*mp era was death to satire.
In which case people could have dealt with a WHOLE lot less political comedy. These days the number of shows just trying to tell jokes and be entertaining are in the definite minority. Late night hosts decided that they must be the ones bringing The Truth every night, and most simply aren’t equipped to do it in a way worth watching.
Europeans have always been addicted to shows which caters to their Anti-Americanism while ignoring the problems in their own country and the EU at large.
Stewart is an artifact of another time. He absolutely played the “both sides are wrong” card as much as he could, and he absolutely believed the lie that it was economic anxiety and not racism, misogyny and Christian theocracy that was the engine that drove the GOP. He never uttered a word that would make his superior-feeling fanbase uncomfortable. The fact that the Democratic Party isn’t perfect does not and will never make them equal to the treasonous threat the GOP has become, but I don’t think Stewart can ever acknowledge that. He famously threw a huge tantrum when mildly called out on his own racism.
Funny you should say “He never uttered a word that would make his superior-feeling fanbase uncomfortable.” considering it sounds to me like you wish he’d tried harder to make Democrats feel superior.
Was it not clear that I’m not a fan?
What does that have to do with what I said?
The hypocrisy angle worked a lot better on The Daily Show’s original target, cable news (and “infotainment news”), pulling back the curtain and reminding everyone how manufactured the storylines were (ditto the effect of showing local news stations across the country all repeating the same lines) than it ever did on politicians themselves.
This is exactly right. The Daily Show’s format worked wonderfully as commentary on the commentators, but when it shifted to being a commentator itself it just fell in line with everyone else and a wry smirk didn’t change that.
You know, the more I hear about this Hitler fella, the less I like him!
I think after about a decade and change of republicans getting completely dunked on by these shows, they looked to Trump and got a major, empowering lesson from him: Never apologize, never be ashamed, just keep moving and eating and legislating and court-packing and smiling and lying and white-power marching until the country is “yours.” They are fully impenetrable now – they make their own rules, play their own game, and nothing you say can hurt them or educate them. It’s extremely clear where all this is headed, but y’know, say that out loud and you sound silly.
You’re so right, but they couldn’t do it without a lot of help. I’m not talking about their voters, as awful as they are, they’re voting for what they want and getting it, plenty of them don’t even like Trump, but he’s a means to get what they want. I’m talking about our voters, they just can’t be counted on to vote consistently, or they’ll vote for some third party with no shot at winning just to give themselves a warm fuzzy. I knew so many people on our side that wouldn’t vote for Hillary, I get not liking her, but long after she was gone, our supreme court pick that we knew she would appoint would still be there. Turned out, it would have been 3, even if we keep the White House for the next 20 years, it will be like Trump is still co-president because he got those 3 justices. Sorry, I’m rambling, anyway, I agree with you, lol.
Frankly I think the Democrats are so obscenely useless that even if Hillary won, McConnell would have successfully stonewalled every Supreme Court appointment she tried to make and shut down the Senate for four straight years. We are ruled by the people of Kentucky.
He for sure would have stonewalled Ginsburg’s replacement, but again, knowing that the next president has a guaranteed pick for the supreme court should be enough to get our people out to vote, but somehow, even that doesn’t do it for our side. If our people voted in force in every election all the way down to dogcatcher, even in deep red states that we still wouldn’t win, but we could make them fight for it, I think we would be in better shape. As it stands now, I’m pretty sure the country is finished in its current form, the Democrats weakness and our voters apathy has handed it to the Republicans, or whatever they are now.
Democrats just had by far record turnout for any US election ever, along with unbelievable turnout for a Senate runoff in a historically unfavorable environment and it has amounted to even less than usual and massive drops in approval even in their most consistent voting blocs like black Americans. What makes you think turnout would change anything? If anything, it would show Dems they don’t have to do even the smallest amount, because no matter what, they’ll still keep their jobs.
I’ve always disliked these shows. I worked in a related media field for a while, and I always believed news was a sacred cow. It was serious and dry for a reason. These shows were fun until people stopped forming their own opinions, and just parroted whatever position these shows took. They are part of the mass shrinking of our ability to think.
Trump killed political comedy for me too, not sure if I’ll ever get it back.
I think the only good one of those shows post Jon Stewart leaving The Daily Show was the one on obscure cable network Fuse that was hosted by Paul F Tompkins and all the pundits were puppets from the Jim Henson Creature Shop.
you say this like Democrats aren’t also hypocritical. All politicians are the same no matter they are red or blue. But your point is well taken. Political comedy has no bite, nobody cares. Most of the public is jaded to the jokes by now.
I could watch serious news that leaves me feeling fearful, angry, and helpless. Or I could watch “fake news” that leaves me feeling fearful, angry and helpless, but lets me laugh and not feel that way for 30 minutes.
Bill Mahar has been doing political comedy since the 80s.
They may have been unfortunately almost entirely white men, but his TDS writers were brilliant.
They left out Hassan Minaj who came up in the Stewart era, and other than Last Week Tonight, which is pretty much the untouchable successor of what Stewart did, was the best of the post Daily show bunch. As for this show not being funny, I haven’t watched yet but I’m actually ok with that. Sometimes John Oliver is a little too funny for me. If this is earnest enough while more engaging then the mind numbing actual news there is a very real lane he can operate in and be very successful
But who will we count on for Arby’s zingers????
Or all the Chicks with dicks jokes he made during Obama’s years.
Hassan Minaj’s program was almost unwatchable, and the pandemic killed it. Oliver can be funny without an audience, he has a natural rhythm and knows how long the pauses have to be. Minaj can’t do that, so they had to resort to weird editing to compensate for his lack of talent.
Strongly disagree. I like Oliver for his coverage of his main topic, but he is rarely funny during that portion. If he’s funny it’s in the opening or closing bits. OTOH, Patriot Act was the funniest of the shows by the TDS ex-pats.
Oliver actually just got lucky, in that during the year before the pandemic, LWT hired a bunch of former internet video creators to the writing staff who (specifically Daniel O’Brien) had spent years creating and mastering the format the show would soon be forced to adopt.
Yeah agree to disagree. I love them both but Minaj’s comedy was more baked in, and I loved the graphics element of his show. He also talked about issues that no one else really did, which when you watch enough of these shows can really feel like a breath of fresh air.
Last Week Tonight’s formula a lot of the time is to explain the subject for 10 to 20 seconds, then say “it’s like if X did Y”. Like they have to fill a per minute quota.
Also left out Jordan Klepper, who had his own show for a while.
Fucking loved Jordan Klepper. That show was super underrated. He and Wilmore getting axed one after the other when both had such unique insight was brutal. Who tf is still watching Samantha Bee in comparison?
The solution to the veteran health issue is clearly just to give full VA benefits and medical coverage to every veteran who served regardless of how near or far away they were from a burn pit. Take it one step further . . . MEDICARE FOR ALL is the solution, not just for all veterans, but all American. I hate frigging ncrementalism. I love Jon, but this cause celebre problem, even if it got fixed, is just a tiny drop in the bucket. Why can’t big celebrities fight for big changes like Medicare for all?
Medicare kind of sucks compared to what many other countries have. That many of us see it as a pipe dream or the gold standard shows how bad off we really are.
it might suck compared to other countries but it would be better than nothing or the current situation, where sometimes people have to choose between bankruptcy or getting the treatment they need to stay alive.
No doubt, and I’ll vote for it if I ever get the chance, but it’s still incremental. The “free” part pays for hospitalization, which is great if you need it, but you can go bankrupt paying for outpatient care and prescription drugs.
I don’t think anyone sees it as a gold standard, more of a palatable way to sell it to Americans. More of a first step on a long journey towards getting a functional health healthcare system than the be-all end-all of the process.
I’ve just come to understand that the US military is one of the largest polluters on earth. They also have a long history of exposing personnel to toxic and carcinogenic materials and then denying it’s the cause of long-term illness in veterans: see agent orange, jet fuel, and depleted uranium.
There is a big body of research from the VA itself that links Agent Orange to many conditions for which Vietnam veterans receive 100% covered treatment. They actually really research this stuff. It’s real science and heavily scrutinized by the National Academies. The issue is not the science. It’s the stupid law that says, unless there is a strong statistically significant link from exposure to health condition, then VA won’t pay the medical bills. If we had universal free health care, all of this would be moot moot moot.
Yup, my dad died of cancer connected to Agent Orange and they’re trying to nickel and dime us because he was jusst far enough from Vietnam’s shore to not be eligible. Thankfully we’ve been assured my mom will probably eventually get a pension for it and backpaid the few years we’ve had to wait, but he never got to see it happen.
Sorry to hear.
Wait until you hear about all the people they kill.
I like John Oliver for the silly bits (the rat erotica, the mascots, the duck stamps), but I’m very tired of self-righteous zealots preaching from behind a desk. And they don’t accomplish anything beyond inflating their ego: if you watch them, then pretty much you already agree with them, so the effort is wasted.
I don’t think Oliver comes off as self-righteous or a zealot. And even if we accept your premise as reality on the audience, there’s still value in educating or offering different perspectives or insight to people who broadly agree with you, or throwing a massive spotlight on an underserved but necessary to discuss topic. Some of the best LWT segments are on issues or problems that would have never been the focus of 15/20 minutes of cable airtime, highlighting concerns that even people in the broadly progressive viewing audience might not be aware of. Plus they do it with actual standards for accuracy, while usually anticipating and addressing the likely talking points from whoever will be mad about the segment when it airs. I agree it’s a tough balance to nail and almost no other show does it, and I also could certainly see how it isn’t appointment viewing. (It isn’t for me, I try to catch up when I can.)
Yeah, the value of Last Week Tonight never struck me as being in conversion, and I don’t think that was ever the goal. The value is in illumination and education on topics that are either horribly under-represented or complex enough that people don’t fully grasp what’s going on. Unlike most other political comedy shows, it goes beyond just highlighting an issue the audience is deeply familiar with and going “how about that?” to cheers. And while the execution doesn’t always get there, I think the attempt is worthwhile.
It was like this until 2020. Before that they were many topics (FIFA, Miss America), now everything it’s about race in America.
It’s essential, what Oliver does. As we can see, the educational system in this country is garbage that enables white supremacy. He takes topics that would not see the light of day in main stream news outlets and presents concepts and perspectives to his largely liberal but largely main stream, and therefore centrist, viewers. The job he is doing in teaching poorly educated mainstreamers
Have you watched LWT lately? Pretty much since Trump, his topics are stuff MSM talks about all the time.
It’s a comedy show. If you found it funny, great. If not, bummer.Everything else: The advocacy, the charity, the catchy songs roasting conservatives over an open fire? That’s extra. That’s a bonus. If it doesn’t work for you, nothing is lost.
Seems like an odd choice of topic for a first episode, but I guess I get it; vore is weird.
“John Oliver’s deep dives on a topic that are informative yet never less than hilarious” I generally love Oliver’s Show, but his “jokes” during his main subject are rarely funny.
They don’t care whether you find a throwaway joke funny or dumb, because they’re not striving for high comedy with the asides. After being serious for a while, they just want to wake your brain up with a joke so that you can refocus on the serious bit.
No mention of the deceased Patriot Act since you included Problem Areas?
I guess Jon Stewart got tempted back into the game by watching all the crazy in the world and thinking up funny things to say about it but even without him, I’ve fallen off with US late night shows because the various writers rooms across them tend to gravitate towards the same jokes and approaches to the same stories.
I wonder why he left just before T***p got elected. Seems like a strange time for a liberal comedian to leave; there were times from 2017-21 that I really missed hearing him rant about the situation. I wonder if he and others like Olbermann just felt too much despair about the whole thing and wanted to hide under their bed like I did sometimes.
Olbermann is a well known dick who is incredibly hard to work with. In almost every chance he gets to talk about it in an interview Dan Patrick will say how much he disliked working (off-screen) with Olbermann.
I don’t doubt that about Olbermann at all, but he was absolutely savaging T***p on a daily basis before suddenly disappearing for no apparent reason a few years ago, and since I didn’t have to work with him, I am willing to overlook it. Bill Maher is also supposed to be a prick off-screen but I liked when he was nailing T***p until he started whining incessantly last year about how the pandemic was *really* because everyone’s so fat and not a vegetarian like him, and then really seemed to lose his mind this year without T***p to pick on.
God forbid Maher point out that obesity is a major comorbidity for COVID. Americans are proper fat: it’s the epidemic that no one seems to want to talk about — even when we’re in a fucking pandemic.
Olbermann was 100 percent convinced Trump was going to be impeached and imprisoned, and this was in 2017 before all the other stuff. He thought it was case closed
and then he came to the same depressing realization that this country is hopelessly divided and polarized, and we’re fighting a death cult that wants power at all costs but doesn’t have its shit together well enough to crash the country like it could if it wanted, so we all live in constant anxiety. Yeah I can see how that would burn out someone.
Olbermann gets blasted by former colleagues in Those Guys Have All the Fun about the early days of ESPN. He takes himself very, VERY seriously.
One of my favorite Stewart moments is him going off on how bad the Democrats fucked up the Massachusetts election replacing Ted Kennedy in 2010(costing them the filibuster-proof senate), and it got into ripping on Olbermann’s hemming and hawing over it
Where does Patrick talk about disliking working with Olbermann? I know Keith is well-known for being a dick, but his friendship with Dan always seemed pretty genuine to me.
There may be a friendship after the fact in the same way Bill Murray and Chevy Chase now apparently get along. But I first remember Patrick saying on the Jay and Dan podcast that he and Olbermann were not friends and the on air chemistry did not exist behind the scenes.
I think being absent during the Trump years has given Stewart a fresh start. He’d have been one of way too many people doing the same show telling the same jokes the last four years.
It’s the comedy equivalent of Rage Against The Machine breaking up just as Bush comes in. I think in Stewart’s case he was simply burned out from the daily grind of being on TV, and the depressing nature of the news he had to mock. By 2015 it was clear that this all was no longer funny.
the cynic in me says that he quit both to make his price go up (he saw that streaming was the future, not comedy central) and because he just didn’t want to ‘do trump stuff’, even then it was fairly obvious how awful it was going to be for a news-based show. i also wonder if maybe he saw that there were going to be 7 shows exactly like the daily show on tv and got out while the getting was good.
Jon announced his departure before Trump announced his candidacy.
I think he pretty mushc said he was burned out from years of doing TDS. John Oliver talked about the fact they were very long workdays with lots of writing, rewriting and then rehearsing so by the time he’d clocked up years on there and made a ton of money, I can see why he wanted to walk away while the show was on an upswing. Also maybe he planned to have more involvement/work on films?
I also remember some back-and-forth between either Stewart or Noah and Oliver about the drop-off in workload between 30+ weeks of 4 shows/week for TDS and 30 weeks of 1 show/week for Oliver, so I get the burnout.
I remember the last couple years he was there, it really seemed like he didn’t want to be. He seemed… tired. Breaking. I missed him too but I think it was the right choice.
maybe Stewart is ready to address my only problem with John Oliver’s show—he lays out a big problem in gory detail and then ends the show without suggesting any way the ostensibly now angry and/or depressed viewer can do something about it. Of course a lot of the solutions are “call your congressman” but Oliver’s segments sometimes are SO deep and dark and it’s the last thing you see before going to sleep usually, it almost seems cruel to do that to someone and just let them wallow.
This is my issue right here. I get that its a comedy show and John Oliver’s objective is “entertain in a way that ultimately brings in eyeballs and thus subscribers to the company.” Solving the issue is rarely part of that. I know he forgave some student debt and did some minor things, but I am not sure structurally what he could do. I’m not sure what else he is *supposed* to do. I live in a pretty consistently liberal state; calling my Democratic senator isn’t going to do shit for the Freedom to Vote Act. Hell, even if everyone in Texas called their senators and demanded that they vote for it, those senators *still* wouldn’t vote for it. And any kind of structural changes (for example, flipping the duties of the House/Senate, making Election Day a federal holiday, repealing the second amendment, etc.) are never going to happen because the minority rule Republicans have a system in place that gives them an outsized say in government that they have to hold on to because they can’t win on issues. Going back to TDS/LWT/Full Frontal, etc. they are not supposed to solve these issues, but I agree that it is getting exhausted being shown why I am supposed to be outraged, I agree, then everyone goes home. That emotional shittiness is not worth the jokes.
[oops, replied to wrong post]
Well, it’s… kind of a polite fiction that we schmoes *can* fix these problems, right?
sometimes yes…remember when John Oliver did the story about how that dicksmack Ajit Pai at the FCC was trying to kill net neutrality and he showed how to delay the process by submitting complaints online or whatever? I actually did that and I never do anything like that, because he got me fired up and then said “here’s something you can do to vent your frustration.” He never promised it would solve the problem, but it wasn’t nothing. That’s all I’m asking; John Oliver has an army of pissed-off liberals at his disposal if he chooses to wind them up and point them in the right direction. He won’t be able to do this for everything he covers but I wish he’d do it more because some of his stuff is downright apocalyptically depressing (e.g. global warming).
I do not keep up with his show, but back when I used to watch clips of it fairly often I actually thought he did a pretty good job of including that sort of suggestion — an action that appears to at least accomplish *something*, and at the very least provides the viewer the kind of pressure release that you’re describing. Maybe he doesn’t include those so much anymore?
He sort of got away from it for a while, but I’ve noticed they’ve been ending on “what can we do?” more often lately. For a few months my wife couldn’t watch it because it just made her feel really depressed and hopeless.
You could theoretically move en masse to states like Wisonsin, or swing districts in purple states. Otherwise, yes.
You’ve cracked the problem I have with Oliver as well.
John Oliver has said he is not in the advice business. He is of the school of thought that you let the people know the full extent of their problem and then hopefully it focuses their minds to find a remedy…or in the case of Americans in general, not. He believes (rightly) that it is not on him to provide a solution to your issue–it’s on *you* to find a solution to your issue.
He spends 30min detailing a symptom of capitalism without ever underlying the root cause, so of course he can’t offer solutions to it either.
Funny you should say that considering a week ago you criticized him for not being “anti-capitalist” or “anti-imperialist” without defining either term.
Because there’s no need to define it. Same as I don’t need to define Capitalism. Asking for definitions of simple words is just a way to derail the conversation and waste time so don’t be surprised that I ignored you.
I just Googled the definition of capitalism, and it says: “an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” That last part implies to me that “anti-capitalist” means you support trade and industry being controlled by the state, which I think hasn’t worked out too well when put into practice. Do you think that’s a fair characterization, or are “capitalism” and “anti-capitalism” more complex than their dictionary definitions?
when you realize he has now spent ~120 hours (8 seasons x 30 * 30 minute shows/season) complaining about various facets of the United States that all boil down to capitalism (I would also add Christian religious extremism to that as well), it makes you wonder why he became a citizen in the first place (and I don’t mean that in a Cult 45, “love it or leave it commie!” type of way; I fantasize about retiring to a more enlightened country than the US all the time).
Because this is where the job was, I suppose. Besides, he could spend just as long complaining about the problems in Britain, since the root cause is there too.FWIW while that is a problem I have with the show, that feeds into what you said of not offering solutions, I think this is probably as far as he can go on television, given that it is a for profit business belonging to a giant corporation.
Dedicating 20min to some small aspect of the financial market that is destroying people’s lives almost every week at least can lead people into connecting the dots themselves, and it’s much better than other late night hosts going on and on about Orange Man bad and wondering where the reasonable Republicans that they remember from their childhood (that never really existed) are right now.
You have no problem with letting black, brown, and mixed people, and unhoused persons wallow at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. No one actually is ending white supremacy, only spackling over the violent eruptions of reactions to its standard operating evil so they are less visible to the Unwarranted Default. AmeriKKKa doesn’t care what the dark horde thinks or feels, only that it serves, obeys, praises, and continues to vote for its Masters.
Much of what Oliver talks about requires legislative or structural changes that are logical and even straightforward onntheir facem but will never come to pass in a climate where just doing the right thing (any right thing) leads to a fist fight.
John Oliver has gotten so good at breaking down issues and also having the ability to convey the absurdity of many of the worlds worst human beings that everyone else kind of pales by comparison. I know Stewart was a mentor to him but Oliver has taken those teachings to a new higher level.
Oliver was also doing The Bugle podcast while a writer on TDS. Anyone who followed that podcast knew exactly what LWT was going to be… and I’m glad it is. Riling people up is one thing in political comedy, educating the choir while also preaching to them is another. Oliver does that very well.
Helloooooooooooooooooooooo Buglers!
What up, fellow Bugler.Also if you ever get the chance to see Andy Zaltzman live, he’s terrific. His show I saw in Soho is my favourite live comedy I’ve been to and it was a lot cheaper than say Bill Bailey’s fairly indifferent arena show I went to in the last couple of years.
Hard disagree. Oliver has slipped a lot in last few years, though he’s gotten a bit better since Biden took office. His whole schtick amounts to using his insane budget for some cartoonish thing that only vaguely relates to the topic and it’s gotten tired and predictable. To be fair, the amount of ridiculousness in mainstream media stories makes it hard but he’s still phoning it in.
The interview segments were never my favorite part of Stewart’s Daily Show.
…huh?Jon Stewart was by a country mile the best interviewer of his ilk during his tenure, this take is baffling to me.
How do you define his “ilk”? Other than when he would have someone on to lambast, it was generally the same old, same old for late night hosts. The only difference was he had a much higher ratio of authors, politicos, pundits, and activists to celebrity guests, which was better. You can’t get much done in 7 minutes.
His ilk being late night comedians who interview folks. He actually read their stuff and had shit to say about it, which was huge in the 2000s.
Stewart was far an away one of the best late night interviewers, having interesting guests and (gasp!) actually reading the books beforehand. He really broke away from the lazy “I am told by an intern you have an amusing anecdote” style of interviewing that late night made more or less mandatory.
Jon Stewart is an old white guy so in the new hot take era, him coming back has to have some amount of negative spin to it.Meanwhile, you haven’t heard much from Samantha Bee or Trevor Noah on these sites, because you can’t even pretend they’re funny or insightful enough to be relevant.Stewart and Wilmore going off the air while Bee and Maher stayed, Noah came in and Oliver got completely stuck on the most generic anti-Trump stuff absolutely killed political late night.
I’ve never had much of a look behind the scenes at the people who produced his earlier show, but feel like Stewart always did a good job getting women and POC in front of the camera. So he shouldn’t beat himself up TOO much.
I just can’t with this type of TV show anymore. I’m too cynical. Too burned. Honestly, too hopeless.If you know any of the people who are responsible for these problems, and there are many, then you know they literally do not care about the people being affected. They don’t care about you, either. They don’t care about “voters.” They care about doing whatever they can to ensure many dollars arrive in their pockets, because the support they give to the wealthy people ensures they get even wealthier, and who then share a small percentage of those dollars with the people causing the problem that allows that to happen. It really all comes down to dollars, doesn’t it?Basically, no amount of sunlight or shame will solve the problem, because it’s systemic, it’s endemic, and it’s pervasive. And again, they just don’t care. Who’s around to know or care about what the history books say? And who’s gonna write the history books, anyway? Dollars are now more powerful than words, anyway. Until we burn down the system and start over, which at this point would probably mean a catastrophic impact on society at large (hello climate change), I have zero faith in things improving for people who aren’t either rich beyond imagination, or the people who facilitate that wealth (ie politicians and lobbyists). Sorry. It’s just too much and we’ve let it go too far.OK. Maybe I’ll watch it. Jon is so charming.
frequently have satirical segments where they perform more like Stewart than the stiff, buttoned-up Walter Cronkite wannabes parodied on “Weekend Update”.Trying to remember the last anchor that parodied a stiff, buttoned up type on Update. Kevin Nealon? Brad Hall? Charles Rocket?
Here’s the thing about Charles Rocket. He killed himself!
…Or so the Germans would have us believe.
You know, the more I learn about this Hitler fella the less I like him!
“informative yet never less than hilarious…. Stewart struggles with this balance to the extent he actually tries.”I mean, he always struggled with it.
The McDonough interview was painful to watch.
So this is Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas, but chopped down to a 1 hour segment? Look, I’m usually one of the first people to defend Jon Stewart with whatever breath I can muster because he was my news source for a long, long time. That being said, if you want to see hubris on display listen to his interview on the Smartless Podcast. He took this idea from Cenac and Arnett spent 2 minutes deepthroating him without anyone acknowledging this idea has been done already.
I think the general concept has been out there – it’s essentially the whole 60 Minutes concept as spun by comedians. BUT, I am having a REALLY hard time with the concept that he HAD to call this “The Problem with Jon Stewart” when Wyatt’s was called “Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas.”I just can’t get past the thought Stewart titled his show as a slap in the face to Cenac for puncturing his image. And I am willing to wager Problem Areas will stand up as a better show with its season-long deep dive into multiple aspects of a single narrative (policing for Season 1; education reform for Season 2).
Is this more of Stewart’s ‘both-siderism, but vaguely edgy’ bit? Because that gets real old, real fast. While I am glad that Colbert has mostly left that nonsense behind, I can’t imagine Stewart being able to let go of his particular brand of High Broderism.
I would quibble with the idea that Stewart was at the top of his game when he left The Daily Show in 2015. I think he had been burnt out for years and had hit a wall somewhere toward the end of Obama’s first term in office where he just didn’t have anything new or funny to say about the cruel absurdities of modern America, the Republican Party’s slow descent into know-nothing fascism, and Fox News/right-wing media’s poisoning of the public well. And that’s ok! He had a hot streak as one of the nation’s leading satirists that I genuinely believe will be remembered long after we’re all dead. But I think he overstayed his welcome by a few years there at the end.
A.V. Club “B” grades are real world A minuses.
I hope Jon brings in Lewis Black from time to time. I always loved his rants.
again, i’m massively disappointed that this is a documentary type series exploring how jon accidentally fucked up a generation of people by making them think laughing at how dumb republicans are was politics
*reads headline*damn, stewart’s put on that much weight?
Well I thought it was a great way to start the series. An important topic that Jon cares deeply about, and if his advocacy for 9/11 responders is any indication, he will get something done about it. Shaming Congress is in his wheelhouse. The interview with McDonough was infuriating. How in the fuck does this man not know what the parameters are to get the vets covered ? Isn’t that his job? This was Trump Administration level incompetence. And it’s not like Jon popped in unannounced. He probably had to go thru 15 layers of administrative people to get it set up, and then this guy is going on about fucking sinusitis being covered? He had me yelling at the tv, almost in tears, and signing the moveon.org petition, so I would say, at least for me, mission accomplished.
I really wanted to like this show but I just found it unrelentingly depressing and about as entertaining as a trip to the dentist. Its heart is in the right place but as a piece of television it was just awful.
Area 51 workers had a similar issue – getting sock from the classified crap they burned on a daily basis, because nothing was allowed to leave the base to be destroyed.
The interview segments were never my favorite part of Stewart’s Daily Show. This episode’s interview with Denis R. McDonough is awkward, and unfortunately, McDonough, who seems well-meaning, comes off like Martin Short’s shady businessman in a 60 Minutes spoof on Saturday Night Live. That was funny, of course. This isn’t.I’m with you on TDS interview segments, they were never worth it, unless it was one of his comedian buddies where they just fooled around.I think this interview being awkward and uncomfortable was kinda the point. It didn’t feel like one of those softball interviews on the normal news. Stewart was just point blank constantly, “ok, money isn’t the problem, you have the data, why can’t you change this?” and the guy had no answer. That’s what made it awkward, because he had to stumble around to dodge the answer of Why. Can’t. You. Change. This. Honestly more interesting to watch than an interview where they’re just trying to get a soundbite, he was actually trying to get a concrete answer instead of just moving on to whatever.
I loved Stewart back in his prime, but I just can’t any more.His “this is crazy right, it’s not just me” thing was almost therapeutic during the Bush years, but now between the nonstop spew of things to be outraged about (how innocent we were back then by comparison) and the countless people sitting behind desks telling my to be riled up about something I just can’t take it any more. It just fuels my “fuck it, everything is on fire and nothing can be done” at this point.