It's a good thing Jon Stewart is returning to “The Daily Show” once a week because episodes of the show when he first hosted it are suddenly much harder to find.
This week, Comedy Central pulled hundreds of episodes of the late-night show, along with other old shows like “The Colbert Report” that date back decades, from the network's website.
As of Wednesday, ComedyCentral.com hosted a complete archive of his late-night satirical shows, including episodes of “The Daily Show” dating back to 1999, when Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn as host (episodes of his version of the show were not in the archive) and the entire run of “The Colbert Report.”
But visitors to the site now find a message: “Although episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.” The purge was first reported by latenighter.com.
But if parent company Paramount Global is trying to lure comedy fans to its streaming service, Paramount+, they might be disappointed to find that only the final two seasons of “The Daily Show” are available to stream — meaning no episodes from Trevor Noah’s time on the show from 2015 to 2022, or Stewart’s original tenure, from 1999 to 2015. “The Colbert Report,” which concluded in 2014, is not available on the service at all. Neither are “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” which took over the “Colbert Report” time slot in 2015, or “The Opposition With Jordan Klepper,” another late-night satirical show that aired from 2017 to 2018. Some clips from the series can be found on Comedy Central’s YouTube channels.
Comedy Central did not respond to a request for comment on show availability.
The move comes amid a wave of cost-cutting at Paramount, which has faced sharply declining revenue and recently saw a potential sale to Skydance Media fall through. Other company websites have been destroyed in recent days. The MTV News website disappeared without warning from the Internet this week. Visitors to the site, which had been a rich trove of music and pop culture journalism and criticism for two decades, are now being redirected to MTV’s website.
