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Comment by quadrangle | Hacker News Reader

John Oliver's show has honestly taken things to a far better level, dealing with real issues in approachable ways.

The Daily Show is just cluttered with inside gossip about crappy news TV which I don't give a shit about either. Basically, the Daily Show has had a handful of great segments but is mostly straw-man stuff that's kinda nice, kinda meh. Colbert is fantastic but rarely really took on real issues — although his Super PAC thing was superb.

Fact is, John Oliver's show is totally amazingly great. The best of its kind, hands down (says me, someone who basically avoids TV shows and actually has only a modest sense of what's out there).

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> The Daily Show is just cluttered with inside gossip about crappy news TV which I don't give a shit about either.

Believe it or not, parodying that crap 24-hour cable TV news was the original premise. Actually telling the news was a side-effect, at best.

Who knew the old Will Rogers gag of reading the paper would go over so big with a new generation, eh?

I believe 'The Daily Show' has evolved over couple of years as it has become the news source for a large subset of millennials. Hence now they mock relevant topics just to bring awareness as opposed to birth a movement which Oliver does best.

You are entitled to your opinion but try to keep in mind that you are describing three milestones in an evolutionary process. These are performers who are in every sense building off of the work of the one before them. You are outlining the construction of a machine that began with Stewert in 1999, Colbert in 2005 and then Oliver in 2014. A machine with elements from 1999 that don't work as well anymore and elements from 2014 that wouldn't have fit in 1999.

Actually it started with Dennis Miller far before that. SNL really pioneered this genre.

Colbert and Oliver are not the only 'children' of Stewart. In these days of Serbian populist government Zoran Kesić's show '24 Minutes with Zoran Kesić' is one of the few islands of open critique of the regime on the TV with national coverage. (https://www.youtube.com/user/24minutaofficial)

I would also add to the list Bassem Youssef, Egypt's satirist, who happens to be a cardiac surgeon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bassem_Youssef

There's also a strong tradition of this kind of thing in Britain (That Was The Week That Was, Brass Eye, Private Eye, 10 O'Clock News, etc.), and Canada (This Hour Has 22 Minutes is legendary, and has been running since 1993).

Spitting Image (TV Series 1984–1996)

"The series was nominated and won numerous awards during its run including 10 BAFTA Television Awards, including one for editing in 1989, and even won two Emmy Awards in 1985 and 1986 in the Popular Arts Category."

"10 O'Clock News" - are you critiquing standard news coverage, or do you mean "Not The Nine O'clock News" there?

I think I was actually thinking about 10 O'Clock Live. My mistake (and a shameful one, it was one of my favorites).

But yes, Let us not forget Not the Nine O'Clock News.

If you are going to credit SNL you have to credit Chevy Chase.

Rush Limbaugh had a show in 1992 where he photoshopped mocking photos of politicians and made montages of politicians "debating" themselves saying contradictory thing.

It's hard to cover much substance in 23 minutes or however long The Daily Show gets. I think they understand this and treat the show as a time to make jokes, but use the interview segment to really dig into current events. The extended interviews especially are fantastic because they're so candid, sometimes tense.

If you're just watching Jon Stewart for 12 minutes of news jokes, you're only getting a small taste of what the show has to offer.

Jon Stewart is often a terrible interviewer. Especially when he either hasn't found any respect for the guest or when he likes the guest so much they can't take the promotional point of the interview seriously.

In one case he fails to address the perspective of the guest (which means he emotes a lot and asks questions they don't answer) and in the other they more or less just smile knowingly at each other for 5 minutes.

I suppose another way to say it is that much of the problem is that he tends to make the interview about himself.

What you say is certainly true when he is interviewing entertainers, but I do think the parent is correct: if he's got a serious guest on and they are discussing an issue Stewart cares about, he really lets them use the time effectively. He mostly stays out of the way and just helps them stay on topic.

Promoting his agenda through guests is his reward, I suppose, for stumbling through so many interviews with vapid celebrities.

Yeah, the less antagonistic serious interviews go okay. That's why I was so specific about guests that he can't find respect for.

I also don't think he is really stumbling through the celebrity interviews, he's playing himself as above them. When his (lack of) relationship with the guest makes it so that won't work, the interview goes along just fine.

But John Oliver's show is even shorter (or the segments are anyway). So that's no comparison. I'm not trying to knock Jon Stewart, I think he's done a lot of great stuff, but so far John Oliver's show is more consistently amazing.

his coverage of Ferguson to the militarization of the police was brilliant, sadly not enough people will have seen it. Considering all the push back we are now seeing from the police because of changes on the federal level regarding seizures its high time this stuff starts becoming everyday discussion for everyone.

The government at all levels has simply taken too many of our rights or flat out circumvented the law with weasel speak and it needs to be reigned in.

> The government at all levels has simply taken too many of our rights or flat out circumvented the law with weasel speak and it needs to be reigned in.

Agree.. and same goes for our corporations.

John Oliver is remarkable in a sense he comes from UK to US, gets rich by cracking jokes about the very same thing that made him rich!

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