Trevor Noah taking over The Daily Show from Jon Stewart has done better than anyone could have hoped, both in keeping the series alive and bolstering Noah’s profile: As Noah prepares to depart, with his final broadcast scheduled for December 8, he looks like someone who enjoys With unlimited potential, “The Daily Show” looks like a show that has survived a complete reinvention now. It also helped, a little bit, to cover the growing weakness of Comedy Central, a once sterling TV brand that, in the post-Noah era, is likely to be looking for an identity with less stock than ever before.
Names floated to replace Stewart, when he announced his departure, included Amy Poehler and Chris Rock; Not surprisingly, they turned it down, but perhaps it was unexpected that the show would be as successful as it created a star. Noah’s softly flown perspective from abroad as a South African-born political observer seemed surprising and refreshing after Stewart’s skepticism curdled a bit. His personal and engaging story of his mixed-race upbringing in South Africa made his memoir Born a Crime, published a year after his work, a bestseller. His appearance as host of the Grammys — both on CBS — seemed like something more than a synergy within Viacom properties: Noah appeared, as anyone could portray a talk show that’s fast becoming old-school, hip.
Noah may have been helped, at first, by being part of a network that seemed to the world at large like a hive of creative energy. When he became the host of the franchise in 2015, he shared space on Comedy Central with “Inside Amy Schumer,” “Broad City,” “Review,” and “Nathan for You”; “Key & Peele” and “The Kroll Show” both wrapped up recently. There’s not much to say about what Comedy Central has launched in the years since Noah debuted its flagship — a story of diminishing returns from a channel within a company that seems increasingly averse to investing in its success.
But what a face! Noah’s arrival on the scene felt seamless, thanks in part to his own and unique talent for self-confidence. He was a correspondent on “The Daily Show” for a little while before being announced as host, but he wasn’t a household name. By contrast, Stephen Colbert had a long runway run on “The Daily Show” before he got his own “Colbert Report” show, and then plenty of time there before it hit CBS; Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon were introduced to American viewers on ‘Saturday Night Live’. Noah had no such introduction, and actually entered the series without a modicum of negative attention to his previous tweets. However, he had no discernible nerves, and conveyed no sense that he was anything other than the man holding the position.
Perhaps a relative lack of identity helped him slip into the role. Stewart has become so entwined with the show’s comic voice and sensibility — aroused by the absurdity of American politics, and Howard Bell-Eshley so vocal about injustice — that opening a name with known quantitative perspective might prove impossible. Working at a much lower temperature than Stewart’s, Noah probably didn’t often come up with the one joke that perfectly created the political situation. But he was also present in a much busier scene than Stewart did for most of The Last Man: “Last Week Tonight,” which launched in 2014 on HBO and hosted by Stewart’s heir apparent to the “Daily Show,” John Oliver, had a breath to “The Daily Show” but used her once-a-week cadence to dig deeper. Another Daily Show veteran, Samantha Bee, launched Full Frontal on TBS in 2016. Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segments, on NBC’s Late Night show, were no different from The Daily’s fake news format. Show”, albeit considerably more of a joke; Colbert’s arrival at CBS, after a rocky start, meant that Late Night had a high-profile news option.
Noah’s survival through it all as host of The Daily Show — and leaving on his own terms — is a credit to his charisma and sensitivity. stands out. And that he suddenly quit would surely be a source of frustration for Viacom’s brass, who have managed every non-“Daily Show” component of Comedy Central poorly in the years since Noah’s arrival. As with the “ridiculous” replay machine still known as MTV, there aren’t a lot of networks out there anymore. And it’s not incredibly clear that the network has the brand loyalty to successfully relaunch “The Daily Show” as it did in the era when Amy Schumer and Ilana Glazer were Noah’s pals.
Noah left “The Daily Show” after using it successfully as he may have to start his career as a media star. And his ambitions seem huge: Unlike Stewart, whose post-Daily Show vision of himself seemed alternately bitter and sour, Noah is instinctively enthusiastic, so much so that we’ll soon forget his job was talking politics on TV. The fear of Comedy Central, or what’s left of it, must be the idea that we’ll forget “The Daily Show,” too. That series made major names first for Stewart and then Noah, at a time when competition was weaker on Earth and the network was in a better place. Time will tell, though, if Noah leaves, he becomes an even bigger star than the show he left.
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