It’s like a dog dancing, right?
Trevor Noah actually had lots of hosting gigs up to and including one called “Tonight with Trevor Noah” which I have seen described as a Daily Show clone.
When he got the job, I had two concerns: One was that if he focused too much on race (as his standup career might suggest) it would make a tough hour going back to back with the Nightly Show. The second was I wasn’t sure Americans would love a foreigner with a fancy sounding accent criticizing their politics. He avoided my first concern but I am not so sure about the second.
Yes, you have to give him time. Stewart’s ratings started a continuous climb after his first year - Noah only started in September. As noted, Noah is in a much more crowded field nowadays though.
Exactly. No one is great right off the bat (with the exception of John Oliver - but being a correspondent can definitely count as training). Noah has to find his way and what will and what won’t work. Give him a bit of time.
I’m back to watching Trevor on a regular basis. Jon’s last few months were too much “angry old man” (and his latest look with the huge beard has gotten a bit too much “wild man”). Trevor’s been relaxing to watch. I liked Trevor’s bringing up some non-American news with some African pieces on dictators who are eerily similar to current presidential candidates, for instance. I’m sure he’ll get into the swing of things when the election heats up more.
I’ll keep Larry on for his monologue before I switch to a rerun of Modern Family. He’s certainly gotten sharper, but I think he plays up race issues too often.
Colbert has gone off the rails; I haven’t felt compelled to watch him after his first couple of months. Please tell me he has gotten better (at least, please tell me his band isn’t so insufferably hip).
I get to watch TDS at 8 pm here in California thanks to satellite, so I see Noah and Wilmore every night.
Noah is getting better, though Jessica Williams is by far the best correspondent. I watched TDS since the Kilborn days. In the early Stewart days they could send correspondents out to interview people who had no clue what they were doing - no longer. And they had some really awful segments like that gay stereotype movie review one - which Stewart seemed to hate also.
I loved the spooky Sarah Palin sleepover party bit - that was as good as almost anything on the Stewart version. Noah’s big lack is the interview segment. He’s okay with show business people, but hardly has Stewart’s experience and he does not have the background to do good political interviews.
Wilmore’s openings are much better, but the bits in the middle are way too scripted - the difference between a good correspondent interviewing a weird newsmaker and the cast member playing the newsmaker. I’m glad they are not trying to get 3 guests on the panel any more, but I wish the contributors would shut up and let the guest speak. A few guests can take over, but not all of them. Still, much improved from the beginning.
I do remember that, yes, but my point is that, at least here in the UK, its audience is pretty tiny, and having an unknown South African comedian as host isn’t going to make that any bigger.
Jessica Williams? I am not a fan. I like Roy Wood, Jr. And Aasif Mandvi if you count him as a current correspondent.
I also have been watching since Kilborn. They even visited my sister-in-law’s church to do a story about a church clown.
I think he’s doing a great job too, though the interviews are, at times, somewhat painful. I’m guessing that’s a much different skill set than the other aspects of the show, and it will take time to get better at that.
John Oliver is knocking it out of the park. Perhaps someone at Comedy Central thinks it’s the accent.
I’m a big Jon Stewart fan. I was very sad to see him go. I miss the impressions.
But then, I was a fan of TDS when Kilborn hosted. I didn’t think Stewart was gonna be able to cut it. I was wrong, but he was a little unsteady at first. He made a point of moving things away from the way Kilborn did things. He made the show his own. Noah will have to do the same.
I also hate the correspondents. I always fast forward through them. But them, that was true in Stewart’s time also.
Well, they recently changed the song and have Trevor Noah walking around for the first minute of the show. I think that’s their attempt to distance it from Stewart.
Our DVR dropped The Daily Show from the scheduled recordings because of the slight title change. I assume this is caused by my cable provider (who is already bad at this).
I haven’t gotten around to putting it back into the DVR schedule. I’ve watched a few bits online. I should give it a chance by DVRing it for a few weeks.
I think this hints at the answer. By hiring Trevor Noah, they reset audience’s expectations. With just about any American, people would compare him or her to Jon Stewart immediately, and any deviation would be unfavorable. But if there were no deviations, the new host would be seen as a soulless clone.
Noah gets a chance to find his own voice without constant criticism about not being Jon Stewart.
A quick Google search shows that she had her baby at the end of the year, so you may very well be right about her disappearance.
Slightly off-topic, I just looked at Desi Lydic’s wiki page, and she appears to be from my my town of Louisville, KY.
Not only big names, but most of former corespondents didn’t want it, from what I heard.
And the problem with any claims about “outsiders” is that Jon Oliver was just as good as Stewart, and people didn’t feel bad about that.
That’s also probably why people are less accepting of Noah. They already saw a replacement who was rather good.
(It’s also why I assume that Noah does those caveats. They worked really well for Oliver.)
As a longtime TDS watcher, the transition has been tough to watch. Noah definitely has not found his feet. His delivery is lacking something. He’s a little too bland and noncommittal. Not biting or acerbic enough for satire. I always feel like he’s trying to make either the network or the audience or the guest happy, and I don’t think satirical humor works unless you believe the host is mostly taking to themselves.
Oliver’s real training was when he took over the hosting duties at TDS for a few months while Stewart took time off to direct a movie.
Oliver wasn’t great right out of the gate, possibly on par with Noah now. But by the end of that run he started to really put it together. Enough that he hit the ground running (full sprint!) with his HBO show.
That happened for a few months? Huh, wonder how I missed that.
Well, technically, wikipedia says he hosted TDS for eight weeks. So a couple months, not a few. By the end he was excellent, and three months later his HBO deal was announced.
That was winter of 2013, and around 4-6 months later Stewart announced he was going to retire. They really missed the boat not holding onto Oliver, I think.
There’s no way they could have kept him. Stewart gave like a years retirement notice. You couldn’t expect to keep Oliver as an occassional bit on the Daily show for that long when he had an offer from HBO.