Jon Stewart Staying with The Daily Show Through 2025

Jon Stewart Staying with The Daily Show Through 2025
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Jon Stewart’s not going anywhere, at least on Mondays. The comedian is sticking with The Daily Show and will host Monday night episodes through December 2025, Comedy Central announced today. The Tuesday through Thursday episodes will continue to be hosted by the show’s current correspondents.

Stewart hosted The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015, turning the news satire show into appointment TV viewing for politically-minded viewers during the Bush administration, and essentially acting as an exasperated ombudsman of a cable news industry that had largely come unmoored from the basic precepts of journalism. Despite the popularity and prominence of The Daily Show during the ’00s, it wasn’t a surprise when Stewart left the show nine years ago; it came less than a year after his former Daily Show cohort Stephen Colbert retired the far more pointed Colbert Report for a cushy gig at CBS, and anybody could be excused for wanting to take a break after 16 straight years of banging their head against the increasing lunacy of American politics and media. It probably didn’t help that, no matter how popular it got within certain quarters, it was clear by 2015 that The Daily Show hadn’t really done anything to alter the country’s course, and maybe even contributed to things getting worse, with Fox News, talk radio, and the Republican Party becoming more extreme with every election cycle, and Donald Trump inexplicably turning into a real presidential contender throughout that year.

After leaving The Daily Show, Stewart entered into a four-year deal with HBO that didn’t result in any actual TV programs. Once that ended he signed on with Apple and launched The Problem with Jon Stewart in 2021, whose hour-long episodes focused in-depth on single issues; it was cancelled after two seasons, reportedly due to Apple’s unease with how the show covered issues like AI (Apple digs it!) and China (Apple really digs its workforce!) After two different deals with two of the only major media companies left failed to really get off the ground, it was similarly not that big of a surprise when The Daily Show, which was already looking for a post-Trevor Noah host, announced in January 2024 that Stewart would be coming back to host one episode a week through this November’s election.

Well, that short-term gig is now going to be one year longer, until the end of 2025. In addition to his one night a week as host, Stewart will continue to serve as an executive producer throughout the new deal. “I’ve truly enjoyed being back working with the incredible team at The Daily Show and Comedy Central. I was really hoping they’d allow me to do every other Monday, but I’ll just have to suck it up…,” Stewart jokes in a statement included in the press release.

You can no doubt expect Stewart to address this news on tonight’s episode of The Daily Show, which, like all of them, airs on Comedy Central at 11 p.m. ET/PT, and streams the next day on Paramount+. It is a Monday, after all. And right now, somewhere in his vacation home in beautiful Palm Springs, Craig Kilborn is hopefully watching The Story of Ricky for the millionth time, blissful and content.

 
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