SPOILERS: Jon Stewart is back.
Apple's "The Problem with Jon Stewart" and its companion podcast mark a significant shift in technique and format from TDS's former host, and he brings his best to the new show.
We’ve seen a lot of comedy news commentary shows come and go over the six years since Jon Stewart last sat behind the desk in The Daily Show’s studio in New York.
And in the fall of 2021, he returned with The Problem with Jon Stewart, which has released four episodes so far and is set to continue for multiple seasons on Apple TV+.
Aside from playing a fake sax solo (a flop that he recovers well from), The Problem is an excellent entry in the satire news commentary that has grown since Jon first took over The Daily Show in 1996.
There are three things that make the program work: the monologue, the guests, and the writing room. Having Stewart back in action is a treat, and it’s great to get not just a conversation with the guests but also his (and the writers’) conversation with the audience. It’s been a long time since any of us have gotten to see him work like this, and even though his beard is white he can still give a monologue with the best of them.
Stewart was The Most Trusted Name In Fake News as the host of The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015. During his tenure the show was home to the development of talents like Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Rob Corddry, Ed Helms, Jason Jones, John Hodgman, Kristen Schaal, Larry Wilmore, Wyatt Cenac, Jessica Williams, Trevor Noah, Hasan Minhaj, Jordan Klepper, and many more. Several members of the TDS cast have gone on to host their own shows with similar formats. That said, there actually has been an interesting divergence along two lines between the progeny of Stewart’s dynastic run and those inspired by it.
On the one hand, programs like The Colbert Report—and now Colbert’s six year tenure as the host of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—have continued the daily format that the original show employed, and one somewhat closer to
The current Daily Show format is somewhat similar to what the original show was, although Trevor Noah and his correspondents have forsaken the live audience even though they have returned to the studio after countless months being produced remotely.
But the other side is the set of more focused entries from shows like Last Week Tonight and Patriot Act and, where the hosts (John Oliver and Davis native Hasan Minhaj) have traded the daily format in favor of a slightly longer, more focused expose on a specific topic. (I was personally devastated when Netflix told us that Patriot Act wasn’t returning for a seventh season. Please come back Hasan.)
Meanwhile, John Oliver—who was with The Daily Show from 2006 to 2013—is perhaps the most successful of the single-focus format shows that have emerged. His weekly half-hour program on HBO has already been renewed for 2022 and 2023, and has won 23 Emmys and two Peabody Awards for its reporting. He has used his platform to advocate for actions on a wide range of topics, dedicating whole shows and a pretty significant budget to stories about systemic issues and government policies.
Samantha Bee (on TBS), Minhaj (Netflix), Oliver (HBO), Colbert (CBS), Larry Wilmore (Comedy Central), Jordan Klepper (CC) and Trevor Noah, his successor, have all gone on to host their own shows inspired by what The Daily Show was with Jon at the helm.
A New Style
Stewart, in his first regular show since leaving The Daily Show in 2015, has also opted to abandon the daily format that he once excelled at in favor of trying out the long form approach. And I think it’s an excellent choice.
In the second episode of The Problem, Stewart talks about the collective action problem that faces a society founded on liberal principles. In other words, it’s the Freedom episode.
In a world where you want to have rights and freedoms for yourself, he explains, you also have to be able to guarantee those for everyone else. That’s the agreement we need to genuinely buy into if we want to maintain or even improve whatever democratic character of our society you might think we have or ought to have.
That means that we have to work to make sure that not only ourselves but also every other member of our society have access to those rights and freedoms. And that means that you can’t just think of yourself or the people who look like you and live similar lives to you—you must invest in that possibility for everyone. That’s a pretty standard egalitarian form of classical liberalism.
But it doesn’t characterize the world that we live in. And if The Problem does anything in its first four episodes, it’s to explain a number of ways in which our society has struggled (to put it nicely) to live up to those ambitious standards. And it turns out that it’s happening on basically every front. That’s the nature of living in a world that isn’t just a blank canvas to play with, where everything that has happened before us has determined the possibilities of how we can even think about living our lives. But there are nevertheless a lot of ways that we could try to improve the execution of a set of highly aspirational standards, one that can account for the reality of everyone effected by policies and decisions, not just those who wield more power in any one particular field.
Elsewhere, there are other battles over Freedom. In countries where the government might be more overtly authoritarian and antidemocratic, there is a battle over convincing people that the current distribution of power really is wrong and unjust.
One of Stewart’s three guests in the “Freedom” episode is journalist Maria Ressa, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, activist, and founder of Philippine news site Rappler. Ressa is a vocal critic of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and her experience of a popular authoritarian regime has taught her how important it is to consider how deeply ingrained our ways of thinking about the world are.
People all around the world have all agreed to a whole lot of terrible things being done by them or in their names for basically all of human history. We can’t just expect people to spontaneously abandon the perspectives they’ve learned over lifetimes, and if we do we’re kidding ourselves and selling our fellow humans short in our estimation of the depth and richness of their lives and convictions. What Ressa points to is a fundamental obstacle to the actualization of any of those egalitarian principles when we don’t appreciate the gravity of the changes that we might want to make.
The other two guests on the Freedom episode are Francisco Marquez, a Venezuelan lawyer and activist, and Egyptian writer and comedian Bassem Youssef, who Stewart met thanks to their overlapping professions.
Both come from countries with much more recent histories of revolutions than the United States—as Youssef points out, Americans can’t even pull off a coup. Not really our style for such an overt transfer of power.
In Egypt, it was very public activism on the ground that began the Arab Spring and ended up bringing about multiple regime changes. And in Venezuela, regardless of any progress that may have been made under Chávez and regardless of the role of bad faith engagement by other nations and transnational powers that have contributed to the status quo in the country, current president Nicolás Maduro definitely doesn’t have his hands clean. But in his case most of those actions are taken overtly in an extrajudicial capacity, whereas in the Philippines there is instead a more overt exercise of power by the government that isn’t supposed to be hidden from the people.
And, as Jon says to Maria Ressa, “I brought you on here to tell me what’s going to happen to us [in the U.S.]!” Her argument is that the Philippines should be seen as a canary in the coal mine for the United States and people who care about the erosions of democracy.
Ressa is on her way to being imprisoned for her work as a journalist and the Duterte regime has persuaded a good portion of the public that they should have the power to do so. A dictatorship doesn’t always start out looking like Maduro, who took over after the once-popular Chavez passed away in 2013. In other cases, like in Egypt or in the Philippines, anti-democratic movements may gain significant support and get momentum from the bottom up. And with guys like Mitch McConnell leading the charge in persuading American voters that they shouldn’t care about protecting the rights of the people in their communities, and plenty far more actively divisive ideas beyond that, it really isn’t that far out of the picture. It turns out that it’s completely possible for bad actors (okay, worse actors) to take over a set of institutions and to do some terrible things with them.
As NPR’s Eric Deggans wrote in a review of the early episodes of the show, “Even in a TV world where lots of other shows are covering similar ground, it's a pleasure to see an old master like Stewart saddle up once again, trying hard to make an audience care about injustice and – just maybe – do something about it.”
The new format may take some getting used to, both for the audience and for Stewart, who is still figuring out how to execute this new style after years out of the game. But what matters is that it allows an excellent host, one who is both humorous and intelligent, to explore crucial issues facing American society. It isn’t always perfect, but it’s damn good to have him back.