Late-night satire expands, but no true heir to Jon Stewart emerges
Successors don't affect public political dialogue the way previous host of The Daily Show did
As Donald Trump grabbed the U.S. Republican Party presidential nomination in Cleveland this week, a whole other race is going on: for the most popular — and most affecting — late-night political satirist.
Almost a year to the day since Jon Stewart said goodbye to The Daily Show, political comedy offerings are many and varied — from Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah to Samantha Bee and John Oliver.
Their skits may fill your Facebook feed, but none of these comedians has yet achieved the popularity or permeated the public discussion of politics in the way Stewart did.
When there were colourful political contests like the current one playing out in the United States, Stewart was appointment television. But the new late-night satirical landscape is much more fragmented.
"There's never going to be the one show that everyone talks about," says Luke Gordon Field, editor in chief of the Canadian satirical online magazine The Beaverton.
Field says he welcomes the multitude of new voices, but adds: "It also means that there's less of a unifying figure for people to rally around, who is the guy for smart political comedy."
Consistency and clout
"What I really miss from Jon is the kind of nightly brilliance," says Jonathan Gray, editor of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era.
Consistency is not the only thing Stewart has over his successors. There is also the very measurable matter of ratings. Noah's numbers as the host of The Daily Show have plummeted by up to 35 per cent from the show's Stewart era, according to Nielsen.
"I think there are moments when he's great but there are other moments when he's just kind of there," says Gray of the 32-year-old South African who inherited Stewart's mantle.
"He also doesn't seem to sort of care or get as angry as Jon did. Jon had this huge detector for all things wrong and they would bug him and it was clear."
Colbert has been wrestling his own ratings demons since he took on the Late Show from David Letterman on CBS last September.
Some observers say it's because his satire has been hamstrung by the tamer expectations of a show on a major network while others attribute it to the public's disinterest in the real Stephen Colbert compared to the over-the-top conservative pundit he played on The Colbert Report.
What happened on Monday night gives credence to the latter theory: on his first night of live broadcasts during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Colbert brought back his alter ego from The Colbert Report and enjoyed a boost in ratings for the first time in months. Also helping? The fact he had a much-publicized appearance by Stewart.
That leaves a Canadian and a Brit who most people see as the closest thing to Stewart's heirs: Samantha Bee and John Oliver. Oliver is frequently praised for his in-depth dissections of rarely discussed but important issues such as prison reform on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
Bee, the newest entrant and the only woman on the late-night comedy circuit, is reminiscent of her former boss Stewart in her impassioned delivery and boasts solid ratings on her TBS show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.
Still, neither Bee nor Oliver has managed to add a title such as "probing interviewer of newsmakers of the day" to their resumes, something Stewart excelled at.
And, according to Gray, they may never get to. He points to the fact that Stewart got high-profile politicians such as John McCain and Barack Obama to come to his show in the first place because he had the clout with the viewers.
In today's splintered late-night marketplace, neither Oliver on HBO nor Bee on TBS yet has the sway over a mass audience sufficient to pull in such a name.
Stewart "had built up the right to fire back at people and he was so successful people would still go on his show, they thought it was worth the bargain and worth the risk. I think right now, none of the current crop have that," Gray says.
The future of satire
So will the true heir to Stewart's greatness eventually emerge? Field doesn't think so.
"I sort of equate it to when Johnny Carson left the Tonight Show and everyone was wondering who was gonna be the heir to Johnny Carson. Turned out there was no one heir. There became two and then five and then 10 late-night TV shows that all started doing what Johnny Carson used to do."
But it looks like some are still holding hope that Stewart can ignite the flames of political indignation in great numbers of people once again.
He signed a deal with HBO to develop and release new digital video content, with some speculating he may do a TV special for the cable network in time for the November U.S. election.
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