While I am very excited about seeing The Daily Show on free-to-air and I think it’s a great move by the pocket money network, one has to wonder the absolute sense of a program like this on at this time on a school night. I’m also pretty sure that the favourite activity of the pocket money generation wasn’t television, but the internet. Why do I mention this? Well, both Jon Stewart and the spin-off The Colbert Report are available online for free at the Comedy Central website.
Almost everything is available online, and with fastracking and using my internet for more important things, I will probably watch this show on TV. I winder though if I am the vast minority in this?
I think the biggest question I raise about this sort of programming comes from an article I read in the New York Magazine about the survivability of Stewart in a post-Obama world. Something about this article has been niggling at me since I read it. Can ‘The Daily Show’ Survive the Barack Obama Presidency?
“How we gonna make this shit funny?” Jon Stewart plaintively asked last night on The Daily Show, in the middle of a series of lukewarm bits about Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory. And it’s a good question. During Tuesday’s Election Night special, Stewart’s Daily Show correspondents gathered around to weep for the end of the election. “We’ve been on the campaign trail for two years,” Jason Jones cried. “What do we cover now?” It was a funny bit, but we think the correspondents were asking the wrong question. The end of the election campaign won’t doom The Daily Show. The Barack Obama presidency just might.
It’s no secret that plenty of satirical outlets — Saturday Night Live, the Onion, late-night talk shows — have had trouble finding good Obama jokes. But we’re not forecasting their doom. The Daily Show is unique, though, in its audience and in its comedic approach, and we’re very worried that an Obama presidency might send Jon Stewart’s show speedily on the road to obsolescence.
The idea of redundancy of a quite powerful media outlet is a big issue that deserves close analysis. I think the issue more important to Australian programming is: Is this going to be yet another show that is scheduled in, just to have the production finish in the home market? I’m sure a showlike the The daily Show won’t be missed if it does leave our screens in only a few short weeks, but is programming now going to be a matter of “pull out of a hat, then cross fingers” in our current context of political and economic change?
