"I miss Jon Stewart so much."
If you've spent any amount of time around liberal people over the last year, you've heard this sentence said countless times. Hell, you've probably said it yourself. It's impossible to watch Donald Trump's rise from laughingstock of the political world to standard-bearer of the Republican party and not feel the void left by Stewart. It's allowing us to get a glimpse of how crazy-making the Bush years would have been without the nightly catharsis coming from Stewart's studio in Hell's Kitchen in New York. So what can we do? Where can we turn?
Samantha Bee's show seems to be a great source for classic and amazing Daily Show–esque produced field pieces where she interviews buffoons and makes them look like buffoons, but the nightly news coverage doesn't seem to quite capture the magic of Stewart's show. Meanwhile, John Oliver has Stewart's desk presence nailed, but his show is only weekly and chooses to cover important, underreported things as opposed to the day-to-day (or week-to-week) of the election grind. Stephen Colbert's show attempts to fill some of that gap, but the host still seems to be finding his lane, and The Daily Show's actual heir, Trevor Noah, is also in the messy and understandable process of finding his voice. This brings us to the correct answer: Seth Meyers.
Meyers has quietly turned the top half of his show into the best comic political-commentary show on television. His recurring desk piece, "A Closer Look," is funny and smart and cutting in all the ways that Stewart was. Watch this recent edition about Trump "reinventing himself" and tell me you don't get the best kind of flashbacks:
Or take this edition from this past week, when Trump became the presumptive nominee. Seth is firing on all cylinders here. It turns out when you pair the skills he mastered over his years at the Weekend Update desk with great, smart political comedy writing and an eight- to ten-minute-segment format, you end up with something that feels EXACTLY like the thing that everyone is bemoaning when they complain about Jon Stewart's absence.
This isn't to say Meyers’ show is becoming a knockoff of the old Daily Show. He and his writers have also developed and nailed a bunch of great late-night bits like my new favorite from this past week, "Jokes Seth Can't Tell." This also isn't to say that Late Night perfectly fills the void left by the Stewart Daily Show. Much like the Oakland A's of Moneyball, we need to re-create Stewart's show in the aggregate, and thanks to Seth's "A Closer Look," we now can. If you make sure to watch "A Closer Look," Sam Bee's produced field pieces, and John Oliver's deep dives into more obscure stories, you end up having your full Daily Show experience, as though Jon never left.
