Variety reports that Comedy Central has canceled The Opposition, comedian Jordan Klepper’s attempt to emulate fellow Daily Show alum Stephen Colbert by pretending to be an unhinged conspiracy theorist on TV four nights a week, after just one season. It seems the public appetite for that particular flavor of late-night comedy has decreased in recent years, possibly because when the barrel-chested crank you’re parodying is going around calling himself a “performance artist,” satire becomes superfluous at that point.
Klepper will be fine, however: He’s already got a new series lined up at the network. In another Colbert-esque career move, he’ll be “leaving The Opposition’s paranoid Jordan Klepper character behind” for the new weekly series, telling Variety, “I figured maybe, right now, the world could use one less asshole.” The new show is tentatively called Klepper, and details are scarce save for a description that makes it sound like it’ll be composed mostly of field segments that “feature [Klepper] out in the field, traveling the country and speaking to people” like he did on The Daily Show in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
[pm_embed_youtube id=’PLD7nPL1U-R5r5XD8saDuOBVj1z69Y_4iK’ type=’playlist’]Speaking of not being an asshole: What about The Opposition staff members who aren’t named Jordan Klepper? Deadline’s report addresses this question, saying that executive producers Stuart Miller and Kim Gamble will definitely be moving to the new series and “other staffers from The Opposition also will likely move to the new series, [although] those decisions are currently being made.” Several on-air correspondents similar to The Opposition’s “citizen journalists” are expected to join Klepper, and hopefully that applies to behind-the-scenes staffers as well.
Klepper and his writers are currently planning the last two weeks of The Opposition, and it sounds like that show’s version of “Jordan” is going to go completely batshit by season’s end: “He feels that everybody is out there to get him, so if anything ends, it’s definitely the globalists, the corporatists, the big wigs at Viacom, the mainstream media, the elitists, the liberals. So he is not going to go out without a fight,” Klepper says. Alternately, he could just start shilling supplements on air.