It was the shocking departure that set off a million moans from a generation of liberals. But if you watched him carefully on Tuesday night and over the past several months, you may have noticed Jon Stewart trying to tell you something: he’s been over the Daily Show for a long time. And don’t blame John Oliver.
The outcry began as soon as a statement from Comedy Central declared that this was suddenly the beginning of the end for a comedian who, for 17 years, has brought Americans into his studio home for the ultimate satirical incarnation of a fireside chat.
Then Stewart had to say it himself – sheepishly, if suggestively.
“I don’t have any specific plans,” Stewart said. “Got a lot of ideas, got a lot of things in my head.” Unfortunately for the audience that tuned into his almost nightly lampoons on politics and his conversations with statesmen, authors and experts, those ideas likely don’t include TV.
“I don’t think I’m going to miss being on television every day,” he said. “I’m going to miss coming here every day.”
With that, Stewart made clear that the grind of writing and producing four shows a week – almost every week, for going on two decades – had worn him down, no matter his affection for his coworkers.
Scryers of the television tea leaves, though, may have seen this coming when Stewart took several months off from the show last year in order to direct a film, Rosewater, while Oliver took over in the interim.
Oliver, at the time a senior Daily Show staffer, was thought to be Stewart’s chosen successor – though nobody knew whether for the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, since at the time Stephen Colbert had not yet departed from his own Comedy Central show.
But Stewart may have groomed Oliver too well for the job, and after a successful summer the younger man left to manage Last Week Tonight for HBO, the hit with in-depth, informative segments embedded across the internet the way shorter-form clips from the Daily Show used to be.
Despite Stewart’s perpetual acclaim and the teary-eyed reaction of the internet (from a largely wealthy and liberal audience), the fracturing market for TV viewers saw his ratings suffer in the past four years, as other late-night hosts like Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien chipped away at the younger audience that is key to advertisers and the future of TV, online and off. Stewart’s viewers are going gray right alongside the comedian, and according to FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten, most of them are now over 40.
So while Stewart has clearly thought a lot about leaving the Daily Show for personal reasons – “I’m going to have dinner on a school night with my family, who I have heard from multiple sources are lovely people,” he said – the comedian’s teary end-of-show spiel made it pretty clear that he’s ready to move on to a different game, at a slower pace.
There’s also a clue to Stewart’s intentions in his choice of Oliver to fill in for him in 2013 and in Rosewater, his film about a journalist imprisoned in Iran after reporting on the 2009 Green Movement protests there.
Oliver has shown a clear disposition for comedy that digs deeper than the usual talkshow fare, the Daily Show’s histrionics included. Meanwhile, Stewart has expressed admiration for print journalists reporting on the ground, such as the subject of his film, Maziar Bahari.
“There’s a huge difference between what these journalists are doing on the ground, and the perversion of it that is the 24-hour news networks,” Stewart told the New York Times.
“The only reason you mock something is when it doesn’t live up to the ideal.”
What next for Stewart, self-described as “restless” on the job? He could press on with films, humanizing his arguments through the stories of fictional and real people. He could turn to more deliberately journalistic projects, and documentaries seem an especially good fit for Stewart’s knack for incisive interviews and smart production.
Or he could turn back to TV, just more slowly – NBC reportedly tried to hire him for its weekly Meet the Press talk show, after all. And it’s extraordinarily unlikely, given his pronounced distaste for the people involved, but he could eventually make like Senator Al Franken and get into politics, where his talent for (sometimes reductive) soundbites fits in.
Or he may just take some writers with him and see where restless leads. If Robert Altman and HBO could run a man for president in 1988, then surely Stewart and friends –the crew who helped get Colbert in place to mock the Bush administration to its face, and then rallied some 200,000 people “to restore sanity and/or fear” – will have some interesting ideas.
For now, Stewart can take his time. He may stick around the Daily Show set as long as December. He said his contract was up in September, leaving months of percolation until Comedy Central lets loose the white smoke to announce his successor.
Politicians will make terrible decisions, news anchors will say ludicrous things and journalists will work to suss it out as best they’re able. Stewart, who has always avowed that as a comedian he’s not out to make a difference, will likely try to do just that.
But don’t say you weren’t warned.
