For years, my Friday morning routine was set in stone: I sat down in front of my work computer, opened up the website of the Daily Show and started catching up with the episodes of the past week. It was nice and easy: a solid two hours of good programming on the day before the week-end rolls in… And all of sudden, the drive to do this went away.
When Jon Stewart took time off last year and Oliver assumed temporary control, it was a stern realization of how much Stewart had designed a show that couldn’t be run by anyone else – or at least, not by someone the caliber of John Oliver. The following months were disapointing as it seemed Oliver was just going to step down and resume working as a simple cast member. Then Last Week Tonight happened and the rest is history: with under a third of Comedy Central’s reach, Oliver racks in ratings that are in the same ballpark as Colbert.
In Vulture today, Matt Zoller Seitz takes a stab at explaining what happened and completely nails it:
But that forward-motion thing: It really matters. When you watch Oliver’s show, you’re riding a bike through terrain that keeps changing. Its Comedy Central progenitors are more like stationary bikes: There is the feeling of motion, sometimes furious motion, and perhaps there are tangible benefits (We’re keeping our minds lean? I’ll see myself out, thanks), but are you really getting anywhere? Every Daily Show is, in a sense, the same show; the gags change and sometimes there’s a splendidly silly image, but the feeling of a well-oiled machine is unavoidable. At the end, you feel that certain core beliefs have been repeated and thus strengthened, and that’s about it