When Jon Stewart debated the bowtied Tucker Carlson on CNN's Crossfire in 2006, he drew a now-infamous distinction between his work as a comedian and Carlson's career as a bigoted polemicist, explaining, "You're on CNN. The show that's leading into me is puppets making crank phone calls." It's a theme Stewart would return to during his tenure at The Daily Show, insisting to Fox News's Chris Wallace in 2011 that he wasn't solely a comic, but that "I'm a comedian first."
After stepping away from The Daily Show in 2015, Stewart is back on TV — well, the Apple+ subscription service, anyway — with a new show and a new shtick, albeit one that feels frustratingly similar to the role that made him a household name. In The Problem With Jon Stewart, Stewart has apparently embraced advocacy first, relegating the series's comedy to an awkward background role. It's a subtle but sufficiently jarring inversion that leaves the show in a strange, uncanny valley between the honed satire of The Daily Show in its prime, and the straight-ahead issue investigations of Frontline and other, more serious fare.
