It’s a good thing Jon Stewart is back on “The Daily Show” once a week because episodes of the program when he hosted for the first time around are suddenly much harder to find.
This week, Comedy Central yanked hundreds of episodes of the late night show — along with other vintage programs like “The Colbert Report” dating back decades — from the network website.
Until Wednesday, ComedyCentral.com hosted a comprehensive archive of its satirical late night shows, including episodes of “The Daily Show” dating back to 1999, when Stewart took over as host from Craig Kilborn — episodes from his iteration of the show weren’t in the archive — and the entire run of “The Colbert Report.”
But visitors to the site now encounter a message: “While 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 drive comedy fans to its streaming service, Paramount +, they may be disappointed to find that only the last two seasons of “The Daily Show” are available to stream — which means 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 at all on the service. Neither is “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” which took over the “Colbert Report” time slot in 2015, or “The Opposition With Jordan Klepper,” another satirical late-night show that ran from 2017 to 2018. Some clips of the series can be found on Comedy Central’s YouTube channels.
Comedy Central did not respond to a request for comment about the availability of shows.
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 collapse. Other websites across the company have been gutted in recent days. The website for MTV News 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 dating back two decades, are now redirected to the MTV website.