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The man who made “The Daily Show” appointment viewing has announced he will be returning to the show. Jon Stewart, who hosted the comedic round-up of the day’s headlines from 1999-2015, will take up hosting duties on Monday nights, starting February 12th. Needless to say, an entire generation of fans- many of whom admitted they would get their news from “The Daily Show”- are excited to hear the announcement, but the yet-to-be-answered question is: does Stewart have enough left in the tank to dodge worries he’s lost his edge, while righting a show that has struggled since he left?
ABC entertainment contributor Larry Hackett leans toward the “you can’t go home again” school of thought. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program and says, in the end, we’ll just have to tune in to find out.
“Jon Stewart left the show on the eve of the 2016 Republican debate,” Hackett told Berman and Riedel. “He literally left before all the mayhem occurred… His first show, and the subsequent, let’s say, month of shows, the Monday nights, are going to get unbelievable attention. People are going to be dying to see how funny he is, and, of course, it’s going to be tough. He’s going to have to be absolutely knock-down hysterical for people not to say, ‘Gosh, he was funnier before.’ I mean, comebacks are tough.”
The fact that it’s only a once-a-week stint, Hackett argues, makes it a bigger hit-or-miss effort on Stewart’s part. “Again, once a week? I mean, in a way, he’s making it even harder on himself. If he was going to be on five nights a week- you know, if Wednesday wasn’t funny, but Tuesday and Thursday were, that’s okay. Once a week? That’s tough… and because he’s going to be frozen in time from what he was in the early part of the 2000’s, it’s going to be very, very hard.”
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