I’d forgotten Kal. I bet he can pull in some fun guests as well.
Not having seen this show in months, I would like Silverman or Schlesinger. Frankenstein might be okay. Are there no other choices?
What’s the matter with you people? I was joking! Don’t you know a joke when you hear one? HA-HA-HA-HA. Jesus Christ, get me out of here! Open this goddamn door or I’ll kick your rotten heads in! Mommy!
They could keep the rotating hosts indefinitely. Here in the UK, we have a satirical panel show called “Have I Got News for You” that used to have a fixed host, then when he was forced to step down, they tried guest hosts for a while as a temporary thing, and it just worked, so they kept it that way. That was 21 years ago.
Of course, there are a couple of differences…there are two panelists on HIGNFY who have remained the same throughout, and a lot of the humor actually comes from them teasing the guest presenter, either for their performance on the day, or their own involvement in the news. This needling saves what would otherwise be a bad presenter.
It couldn’t work quite like that on TDS, though it was funny during Trevor’s reign when there was occasional back-and-forth banter.
IIRC, for a while in the ‘80s Saturday Night Live just had their current host sit behind the Weekend Update desk to riff on the news as the current anchor — so, Robin Williams one week, and Jesse Jackson another, and George Carlin after both of them, and Don Rickles beforehand; and even Michael Douglas wound up taking a shot at it along the way, because why not?
Wow. I have no memories of this at all.
Searching the SNL wiki, I found this:
[Brian Doyle] Murray was let go at the end of the [1982] season, and the segment changed names again. Initially, it was Saturday Night News with Brad Hall. Hall was pulled from the news desk after a season and a half. For another year, the anchor position rotated, starting with Don Rickles on the January 28, 1984 episode. Halfway through season 10, [on December 1, 1984] Christopher Guest took over as permanent anchor.
The show must have been so bad I stopped watching. Fortunately, Lorne came back in 1985 and installed Dennis Miller, still the best anchor ever.
I’ll have to see if I can find these relics, just for the shock and awe.
Nah, Norm was the best.
I like Hassan.
He’s got the perfect balance of funny but also serious and intelligent interviewer.
Which is exactly what I look for in a Daily Show host.
I despised Norm’s shtick of telling bad jokes just to enjoy the audience’s reaction.
Every once in a while the rerun at 10pm on Saturday will have a Norm WU. They are uniformly awful. He sits there and smirks at the confused low chuckle the mike picks up instead of laughter. I get that he’s a comedian’s comedian because he’s so brave. Take it elsewhere.
Sorry for the hijack of the thread.
Anyone but Hasan Minhaj please. His frenetic energy makes my teeth itch. Too much smug oozing out of the TV.
I didn’t watch a lot of Kal Penn’s time but what I saw wasn’t bad. I think he could grow into the role.
Roy Wood is my choice. He’s a very good standup and looks comfortable as host.
I don’t hate the idea of rotating hosts. Logistically I don’t think it sustainable.
I’m surprised nobody else even brought up Wanda Sykes yet. I thought she was great and I’d love it if she did it permanently.
Probably zero chance but that’d be my choice.
I liked Sarah Silverman’s turn more than I thought I would: I figured it’d just be her default approach (which I like just fine), but she brought something else to it (which I liked even more).
I didn’t get to see them all and I only saw a couple of short clips of her.
Norm is the best. Just not his SNL stuff.
I finally watched the Roy Wood episodes, I thought he’s been the best so far. He reminded more of Trevor (before he started doing those awful asides) and even Jon: tell the jokes without stumbling, do a decent interview, and have good rapport with the other correspondents.
I really wanted to like Al Franken, but he was just a bit “too much”. Bringing on Lindsey Graham was pretty ballsy, but he should have thought about it a bit more (and who his audience was). Plus he’s just too old for the network to hire.
Breaking news. Kinda.
Chris McCarthy, the head of Paramount Media Networks, Comedy Central’s bosses’ boss, gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter.
Reimagining The Daily Show was supposed to be the bigger headache, or at least that’s what McCarthy likely imagined last fall when host Trevor Noah abruptly announced he’d be departing at year’s end. Instead, McCarthy, who says he’s consulted Jon Stewart and his agent James “Babydoll” Dixon, has been stunned by both the linear tune-in, up 13 percent year-over-year, and the social excitement around the rotation of guest hosts, who have included Kal Penn, Chelsea Handler, Hasan Minhaj, Sarah Silverman and Leslie Jones. “It’s killing it,” he says, noting that on many weeks the social media footprint has been “10 times bigger” than the show has seen in years. And while he intends to wait until late spring to name a new host, for which he’ll rely heavily on the input of showrunner Jen Flanz, he has his own running shortlist, which features three guest hosts. Without naming names, he says, excitedly, “Two people came in and exceeded my expectations, but I had high expectations, and then somebody else just blew me away.”
So no rotating hosts, and an announcement in “late spring,” probably at the end of the guest hosts’ run.
I hope it’s Hasan Minhaj. I miss his Netflix show, Patriot Act, quite a bit. Think he’d be great as the TDS host.
I love Roy, if you’ve never watched his standup I strongly recommend it.
But I think a host needs to be more than funny. The show needs someone who is hilarious but also can convey something serious. Jon Stewart was a master at that, and Trevor was also great. I don’t feel like Roy has that skill.
I’ll say that Roy’s appearances on the show when Trevor was host, for his “traffic reports”, we’re my favorite bits on the show.
I haven’t watched TDS since 2016. I couldn’t stomach that much daily Trump news and I was loving Colbert on The Late Show, and Trevor never grew on me.
That being said I absolutely adored Hassan’s Patriot Act, even more than Larry Wilmore’s Nightly Show. I think Wilmore could do it but I think Hassan could do it even better. I did watch a clip from one of Hassan’s turns and I loved it.
I have a related question to the show, but not quite on my original topic:
Does Lewis Black ever come on and do Back in Black anymore? That was the oldest segment at one point, going back to Craig Kilborn.