Enlarge / Jon Stewart is back on TV to set some things on fire. (credit: Apple TV+ / Busboy)
In Jon Stewart’s first-ever conversation with an Apple TV+ studio audience, he offers a curious send-off—in fact, it argues against the point of his new multi-million dollar hosting deal. “You’re probably just going to look at aggregated clips of” this first episode of The Problem With Jon Stewart, he says, instead of subscribing to Apple TV+. It’s a bit meandering, followed by a joke about pirating episodes of Ted Lasso.
If anybody can show up to a new streaming service and make a joke at the expense of subscriptions, it’s probably Stewart. Online video sharing—and we’re talking the renegade kind, uploaded by fans and shared freely—greatly contributed to The Daily Show‘s massive cultural footprint before Stewart left that show behind in 2015. And as you may have noticed, the TV landscape has dramatically changed since then. These days, every major player is throwing stuff at the video-streaming wall to see what sticks (or, in Quibi’s case last year, what absolutely doesn’t).
So after six years off the “fake news” desk, what path does Stewart and Apple’s new production take? His aforementioned joke may suggest a series that’s meant to be shared and remixed in small clips, but The Problem arrives with a different modus operandi: empathy, not sound bites, and patience, not pulverization. You can arguably pluck out some zingers tailor-made for quick swipes on a service like TikTok, but Stewart seems more invested in relishing the full 44 minutes of each episode. As a result, this fake-news innovator spends the runtime of his new series punting the “fake” out of his reputation, expectations be damned.
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