‘Daily Show’ Alumni Mourn Loss of Clip Archive After Website Cleanup

Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” in 2015

Daily Show/Comedy Central

A company’s decision to remove much of the content from Comedy Central’s website is not sitting well with a number of former and current employees. Daily show Staff.

The sites of Comedy Central and Paramount’s other cable channels, CMT, Paramount Network and TV Land, were largely stripped of content this week; what remains mostly redirects users to the company’s streaming platform, Paramount+. The media conglomerate also shut down the MTV News site earlier this week.

Paramount, which is looking to cut half a billion dollars in costs amid falling profits, said the removal of the sites was “part of a broader change across all of the company’s websites.”

“We’ve introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, bringing fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows,” the company said in a statement.

Paramount+, however, only offers the two most recent seasons of The daily show available for streaming. Comedy Central’s website previously hosted a huge archive of episodes and clips spanning most of the show’s history (as well as other late-night shows). @midnight, The Colbert Report, The Night Show And The opposition with Jordan Klepper). This archive is now gone. Some material is on YouTube, but The daily showThe channel there, for example, contains no material from before 2016.

“I have to bring back the man from the bootleg DVD,” former Daily show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. wrote on X. This shit is not good. Doug Herzog, who ran Comedy Central when The daily show launched, reposted Wood’s statement in an Instagram story and added a facepalm emoji to a screenshot of a news story about Paramount’s gutting of the website.

On Bluesky, Daily show Writer and producer Daniel Radosh noted that the show’s staff regularly used the clip archives on the website: “Hey, for extra fun, guess what the only way was for people who still work on the show to find old clips that are important to have as part of the production of said show! » he wrote.

Tim Carvell, executive producer of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and 10 years Daily show veteran, took on Paramount in a Bluesky article: “2002: ‘Watch out, kids, the Internet is forever!’ 2024: ‘Oh hey, all the work you’ve done for a decade of your life has just been deleted from the Internet for commercial reasons.’