Jon Stewart returns "The Daily Show" to old times. His successor may be a retrofit, too

By every metric that matters – standing ovations, media orgasms and, above all, Nielsen ratings – Jon Stewart’s return to “The Daily Show” is a smashing success. His first Monday back drew nearly 930,000 viewers in live same-day ratings, the show’s biggest audience since March 2018 and the highest-rated in the 25-54 age demographic since 2017.

Critics weren’t merely overjoyed but relieved to see Stewart slide right back behind the desk as if he never went anywhere.

“Miracle of miracles, Stewart has not lost the ability to be our guy, to act as the collective release valve for anger too studied for stand-up and too frank for news media,” Charles Bramesco wrote in his review for The Guardian.

“It doesn’t matter how many hosts 'The Daily Show' has had. It is Jon’s job,” said W. Kamau Bell in his newsletter. “Sort of like if Johnny Carson came back from the dead and wanted his job back as host of ‘The Tonight Show,’ Jimmy Fallon would haaaaaaaave to step aside.”

That is the highest of compliments and possibly true. Carson proved that spending 30 years hosting the same show ensured that everyone who followed him would struggle if not fail to live up to the standard he set. “The Daily Show” turns 28 this year, and Stewart served as its host for more than half of its existence. He also left at a drastic turning point in American politics, the news media and the public’s relationship with objectivity.

And yet, who didn’t grin a little when he opened his second series premiere in vintage “Daily Show” Stewart fashion with, “Now, where was I?”

If you are reading this, you have no doubt read that opening line already, or watched it live, along with the highlights of his 20-minute, commercial-free monologue during which he took jabs at the advanced age of both presidential candidates and himself.

Pulling his classic “Meet me at Camera 2” move, Stewart motioned its operator to zoom in for a close-up, saying “Look at me. Look what time hath wrought. Give the kids a treat of the lunar surface here. Look at this. I'm, like, 20 years younger than these motherf**kers.

“. . . And if you’re thinking, ‘Oh, well 20 years isn't that long,’ this is me 20 years ago,” he added, pointing to a photo of himself looking downright boyish behind the “Daily Show” desk in 2004.

The success of Stewart’s glorious return after more than eight years away from the host's chair, and following his muted departure from his Apple TV+  show "The Problem with Jon Stewart," was never in question. Every contemplation of “The Daily Show” has related its problems to Stewart’s exit.

Trevor Noah, who was the right host to steer us through Donald Trump's presidency, could never match Stewart in some people’s minds. (Nor did he try to.) After he left, most of the celebrity guests who cycled through the show’s chair tried to bend the show to their schtick instead of conceding to what its correspondents have long known, which is that Stewart molded its structure and tone. 

The best anyone could do was to freshen up the place with a few coats of paint and maybe knock down a half wall to open up the floorplan a little.

Once the Monday buzz wore off and we all returned to sobriety, a few folks began to wonder whether Stewart’s tried and true strategy of attacking all bad politics was out of fashion. Instead of gunning only for the worst – as in, Trump and the MAGA Republicans – he went after Joe Biden for foregoing the traditional pre-Super Bowl network interview yet again to make his TikTok debut, where he claimed to have a secret fetish for Travis Kelce’s mother – her chocolate chip cookies, specifically.

“Fire everyone. Everyone,” Stewart deadpanned after the damning clip played. “How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older?

This swipe has a touch of “Physician, heal thyself” to it, which Stewart and “The Daily Show” acknowledge in the segments that followed Stewart reintroducing the show’s longstanding correspondents.

Michael Kosta, Desi Lydic and Ronny Chieng pretended to be posted up inside a diner, with Dulcé Sloan fake reporting from its parking lot, a vantage from which she observed, “This is the same s**t all over again. It’s just a reboot! We need more than just the same show with an older yet familiar face . . . They already had this job.” Ha! Because, see, she might not be talking about Trump and Biden, right?

“Now these old white dudes gotta come back and reclaim it? Like, come on, sir," Sloan continued. "Go do something new. It’s so desperate. Like, let someone else run the show.”

We all get the joke. Just when we thought “The Daily Show” was ready to do the serious work of rebranding to fit the times, it went with a rewind. Why not? Vinyl LPs are in again. Plus, with so much of the nation set on rolling back hard-earned sociopolitical gains, maybe the person who woke up Gen X and elder Millennials to prior administrations' outrages is the right one to reactivate them now.

If Stewart seems angrier and more combative now than he was in the past . . . well, aren’t we all? And as I recall his surliness at the height of the George W. Bush years, from whence that 20-years-ago photo he showed was exhumed, I’m not sure he’s changed all that much.

Some have posited this will be the fatal flaw in this experiment. Stewart might not have budged from his consensus that one side of the aisle isn’t much purer than the other, but some progressives expected “our guy” to play along with that tune. Can you blame them? The clips of "our guy" playing in the latest "Daily Show" ads are nearly a decade old. Politics moved differently then.

But let’s slide that stew to the backburner and pose a question Stewart raised, only to address the show’s strategy for the next nine months: What the f**k are we doing here, people? 

To remove all doubt: Stewart’s first night back was highly enjoyable. His jabs at the geriatric status of the candidates topping both sides of the ticket were dead center. So what if he pulled most of his jokes from headlines other late-night hosts digested some time ago? Chalk that up to him establishing his second administration’s platform, letting us know that he didn’t intend to let Biden’s sins slide, regardless of how repugnant the alternative may be.

But less attention was paid to the show's first selection to fill the "Daily Show" host chair on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday: Jordan Klepper.

Killer Mike and Jordan Klepper on "The Daily Show" (Comedy Central)Klepper is astute and capable, one of the two current “Daily Show” contributors who is a holdover from Stewart's reign. The other, Lewis Black, predates Stewart. He’ll get his turn behind the desk soon, Comedy Central assured us in a press release.

Neither is a full-time correspondent, which hints at how producers may be thinking about the best way for Stewart to hand the reins to an eventual successor. Sliding Klepper into the slots following Stewart's first week back gives Klepper the best odds of riding the Great One's ratings spike, along with granting the show something of a bulwark against rating erosion. Theoretically. 

A recent Variety story gauged the success of Stewart’s Mondays-only strategy by likening it to what MSNBC has with Rachel Maddow, another once-a-week talent and the network’s biggest star. But it found that the ratings bump Maddow produces on Mondays doesn’t carry through the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday telecasts in the same timeslot. That may have something to do with other personalities' inability to duplicate Maddow’s singular appeal.

Stewart, though, has time to persuade his faithful to accept whoever is chosen to take over as a full time host. He’s signed on as an executive producer along with his manager James Dixon through 2025, making these the earliest of early days in this part of a process that’s already dragged on for too long.

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Behind all the applause and celebration of the conqueror’s return, the truth is we’re still witnessing the celebrity hosting phase of “The Daily Show.” Said celebrity simply happened to find himself suddenly unemployed, yet still very popular with his base. (And wealthy.) He's the temporary winner in a contest that might have ended if the show decided to take a chance with in-house favorites Desi Lydic or former correspondent Roy Wood Jr.

But Klepper is not entirely inside the building either. He had a weekly "Daily Show" spinoff for a short time, then helmed a docuseries. During Noah’s era, Klepper dropped regular field reports from Trump rallies where he displayed masterful crowd work skills by tangling the MAGA faithful in their webs of ignorance.

Behind the desk, Klepper deftly juggles both the show’s signature fake news snark and the standard host’s avuncularity. He’s also another white guy in long late-night parade of white men. Circling back to Bell likening Stewart’s GOAT status to that of Johnny Carson, let’s not forget that Carson: a) has been very dead for longer than the nation's 18-year-old voters and comedy consumers have been alive, and b) was 66 years old when he retired. That’s five years older than Stewart is right now.

Future weeks of Stewart Mondays and TBD hosts at the helm for the rest of the week will likely produce some pattern that may inform the direction of “The Daily Show.” 

But if the show's own Indecision 2023 and the raging success of Indecision 2024’s nascent stages tell us anything, it’s that we may be too entrenched in the familiar to allow it to fully reinvent itself and plunge into the future with someone new.

Counterpoint: who cares? Jon Stewart is back — big time! It’s like he never left. Perhaps he never will.

"The Daily Show" airs at 11 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays on Comedy Central and streams on Paramount+.