Jon Stewart Returns to an Older, Smaller Audience

*Trevor Noah

My wife and I can't stand him.

Agreed, and I tried hard to like him. I had watched every Stewart episode and then my watching of TDS fell off a cliff with him. I went back a number of times to try again but I didn’t find him as passionate or funny as John. Even the clips that rose high on news aggregators/TikTok/YT Shorts all felt “meh”.

In contrast I absolutely loved Monday’s episode with Stewart again, it was a huge wave of nostalgia and it was like “this is what I’ve been missing”. John just feels way more genuine and that he actually cares about the things he says. Trevor always felt fake or that he was trying too hard.

I could never figure out how to watch it when Trevor Noah hosted. The John Stewart show on Apple TV was basically unwatchable.

I don't have high hopes.

Hopefully, they decide to air it somewhere with a decent sized audience (so, not whatever "Hulu Live TV" or "Fubo TV" are, and certainly not Paramount+), and the writers from the original Daily Show are still there / coming back.

That sounds reasonable, almost all daily show clips are about some thing that was happening at a specific point in time. I bet the interview segments they have where it's just a weird person ends up getting a lot more views because that is mostly evergreen content. Very few people care what the political drama du jour was in January 2007.

Exactly this. I missed the episode, and caught it days later on YouTube.

I've always wondered how a company like Neilson Ratings can make any measurements with every streaming service and YouTube.

While at same time, the streaming services have ton of user data, probably down to exactly how many times, and for how long, you paused it to grab a beer, but don't really like sharing it.

I looked up viewership numbers for relevant streaming platforms:

AppleTV: 30M (2022; probably closer to 45M now)

Paramount+: 65M

Prime Video: 145M (US)

Netflix: 245M (Worldwide 2022)

They're putting the daily show on paramount+, so they're reaching less than 25% of streaming households.

From a viewer perspective, it's basically $6 / month just for this one show (and you have to sit through ads don't even get to watch broadcast CBS on it). You have to get a $12 / month bundle to skip the ads. I can't see sitting through ads or paying that much just for one program.

(Star Trek is great, but holy crap, there's nothing else decent on that service, and, other than the Lower Decks, the new stuff is really, really rough -- this is coming from someone that watched everything up to and including Enterprise.)