What Future Does ‘The Daily Show’ Have After Trevor Noah? What Future Does Comedy Central Have, Period?

Trevor Noah surprised many Thursday night when he announced he’d be stepping aside as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central.
Who might replace him?
Better yet, what’s the future for The Daily Show or, more broadly, what’s the future for Comedy Central in 2023 and beyond? Paramount already has begun folding Showtime into the Paramount+ platform. Would anyone notice if Comedy Central also ceased to exist as a separate cable channel entity? Have you noticed that The Daily Show and Comedy Central itself aren’t even really in the cultural conversation these days?
Let’s take a step back to 2014, when Noah, then largely unknown as a comedian outside of his native South Africa, joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart as a correspondent. Back then, Stewart and the show that followed his, The Colbert Report, dominated both in morning watercooler talk as well as at the Emmys. Since then, Stephen Colbert jumped to CBS to replace David Letterman, and Comedy Central struggled to find any worthy substitute in the 11:30 p.m. Eastern slot. Stewart left in 2015, took a break, pursued other endeavors at HBO which never quite materialized, and eventually popped back up on Apple TV+. Other disciples of Stewart’s Daily Show launched their own weekly talkers, including Samantha Bee on TBS, Hasan Minhaj on Netflix, and most successfully John Oliver on HBO.
Certainly, Noah quieted most doubters that he could fill Stewart’s shoes, in part by making the show his own, casting a broader international net both in front of and behind the screen.

And if you weren’t paying attention to Noah’s interviewing skills with his guests, then his behind-the-scenes segments where he speaks off the cuff with the audience have proven just how smart and sincere he is. His The Daily Show with Trevor Noah – Between the Scenes won an Emmy in 2017 for Outstanding Short Form Variety Series, with three other nominations in that category.
Noah’s own correspondents have done well for themselves, too. Roy Wood Jr. in Better Call Saul, Confess Fletch and his stellar stand-up specials. Ronny Chieng in Crazy Rich Asians and his own Netflix specials. Desi Lydic and Jordan Klepper both have Emmy nominations. They all generate great buzz online.
But on TV? Is anyone paying attention? Does the idea of reading online missives of Noah DEMOLISHING or ANNIHILATING a right-winger have any play any longer? Not really. Even former Conan writer Laurie Kilmartin knows how that’s played out.

And is anyone left minding the store at Comedy Central? The network cleaned house of programming execs in 2020, even before the pandemic and Paramount+, as part of the ViacomCBS merger, including many of the network people connected to Noah’s ascension there. When Noah signed a five-year contract extension with Comedy Central in September 2017 — hmmm, timing! — his show was attracting an average of 1 million viewers nightly, down by half from the numbers tuning in to Stewart two years earlier, but Comedy Central said Noah had posted such great growth in 2017 to reach #1 numbers in the age 18-34 demographic, and third place in the 18-49 demo.

Cut to this week. Wednesday’s episode pulled in 429,000 viewers, per Nielsen, ranking TDS 64th among just cable shows that day in the 18-49 demo (a 0.11 rating). Of course, that was skewed by The Weather Channel soaking up viewers for Hurricane Ian coverage. Monday’s ratings were even worse. TDS ranked 94th in cable, with just 307,000 viewers (.06 rating in 18-49). Over on FOX News, Gutfeld! pulled a .13 rating in 18-49, but 1,911,000 viewers. Ouch! Blame Monday Night Football?
For all of last week (Sept. 19-25, 2022), the outlook seemed even bleaker, factoring in all of the options for late-night TV viewers.

If the TV ratings were grim enough for Noah to see the Grim Reaper writing on the wall, then perhaps turning to social media, where Millennials and Gen Z watch TV clips instead of TV, might serve as slight comfort? Yes and no.
On Twitter, where @thedailyshow has 9.6 million followers, Noah’s Thursday announcement racked up 2.1 million views in 14 hours.
On YouTube, where TDS has 10.1 million subscribers, the video garnered 866,000 views so far.
On Insta, where @thedailyshow has 9.5 million followers, the Reel has pulled 815,000 views.
But on TikTok, where @thedailyshow has 5 million followers, the video from last night only scored 417.8k views, where the algorithm is king and the finger swipes do all the talking.
So as much as I’d love to see Roy Wood Jr. host The Daily Show in 2023, I’m not sure there even will be a Daily Show, or a Comedy Central, worth watching by then.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.