A corporate decision to scrub Comedy Central‘s website of much of its content isn’t sitting well with a number of former and current Daily Show staffers.
The sites for Comedy Central and fellow Paramount-owned cable channels CMT, Paramount Network and TV Land, were largely stripped of content this week; what’s left 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 declining profits, said the gutting of the sites was “part of broader website changes across” the company.
“We have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows,” the company said in a statement.
Paramount+, however, only has 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 covering most of the show’s history (along with fellow late-night shows @midnight, The Colbert Report, The Nightly Show and The Opposition With Jordan Klepper). That archive is now gone. Some material is on YouTube, but The Daily Show’s channel there, for instance, doesn’t have any material from before 2016.
“Gotta bring back the bootleg DVD man,” former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. wrote on X. This shit ain’t right.” Doug Herzog, who headed 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 item about Paramount’s gutting of the website.
On Bluesky, Daily Show writer and producer Daniel Radosh noted that the show’s staff would regularly use the clip archive on the website: “Hey for extra fun guess what was the only way for people who still work at the show to find old clips that are important to have in the course of producing said show!” he wrote.
Tim Carvell, an executive producer of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and 10-year Daily Show veteran, took a shot at Paramount in a Bluesky post: “2002: ‘Careful, kids, the Internet is forever!’ 2024: ‘Oh, hey, all the work you did for a decade of your life was just deleted from the Internet for Business Reasons.’”
