Comedy Central’s best ratings in years earned Stewart two more years of Mondays, a sharp contrast to Colbert’s exit at sister network CBS.
Jon Stewart will be behind the Daily Show desk for the 2028 presidential election. The 63-year-old host has signed a two-year deal to keep anchoring Comedy Central’s late-night show once a week and executive producing it every night, which makes him one of the few late-night fixtures Paramount Skydance has chosen to lock in rather than let go.
Stewart’s last contract, a one-year extension, carried him through 2026. The new one runs through 2028, so it covers the midterms two weeks from now and the entire next presidential cycle. The format stays the same: Stewart hosts Mondays from the show’s New York studio, and correspondents Ronny Chieng, Josh Johnson, Jordan Klepper, Michael Kosta and Desi Lydic rotate through Tuesday to Thursday. Jen Flanz remains showrunner, and Stewart keeps his Weekly Show podcast.
“Jon Stewart is a generational talent,” said George Cheeks, co-chair and chief content officer of Skydance TV, calling the show “a cornerstone of Comedy Central.”
The math explains the deal. The Daily Show averaged a little more than 1 million viewers in the third quarter, its best third quarter since 2018. Stewart’s original run lasted 16 years before he left in 2015; his return in 2024 is what turned the numbers around. For a cable show in 2026, that is a rare growth story, and it costs Skydance one night a week of its biggest name.
The team keeps winning, too. At the Emmys last month, The Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse won writing for a nonfiction program and Lydic won for her short-form series Desi Lydic Foxsplains, according to our complete 2026 Emmy winners list.
The renewal reads differently given what came before it. CBS, now part of the same Paramount Skydance company, ended The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this year, calling it a financial decision. Keeping Stewart, whose politics are no gentler than Colbert’s, suggests Skydance is willing to pay for political comedy that grows and walk away from the kind that is expensive and shrinking. It is the same consolidation logic we flagged in our open letter to David Ellison and in our look at Discovery+: Skydance keeps what makes money cheaply.
For New York, it also means one of Manhattan’s late-night shows is safe through the next election.
