Current and former Daily Show writers are pissed that Paramount gutted its website

We have a pretty good guess as to what Jon Stewart’s main Daily Show discussion topic will be during his weekly appearance on Monday, and it’s not tonight’s debate (and not just because he’s already covering that tonight). This week, Paramount made the infuriating and existentially terrifying decision to wipe out two decades of archival material across sites like Comedy Central (the channel that hosts The Daily Show), MTV News, TV Land, CMT, and more. That’s a genuinely unfathomable number of hours worked and information gathered just… gone, all for some sort of nebulous Money Saving Tactic.

When MTV News went dark on Monday, people started to pick up their pitchforks. Now that the Comedy Central archives have joined the list of casualties, a number of Daily Show veterans are riding in like the cavalry to join the fight.

The Comedy Central website previously hosted a massive amount of Daily Show clips and episodes, documenting over two decades of the show’s history (alongside fellow late-night programs like @midnight, The Colbert Report, The Nightly Show, and The Opposition With Jordan Klepper). All of that has now been replaced with a pop-up reading, “While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.” Paramount+, however, only has the two most recent seasons of The Daily Show available. You can find some more content on YouTube, but that channel also doesn’t extend back any further than 2016.

The people who created the archive aren’t happy. “Gotta bring back the bootleg DVD man. This shit ain’t right,” former correspondent Roy Wood Jr. wrote on Twitter/X. Per The Hollywood Reporter, former Comedy Central president Doug Herzog reposted Wood’s statement on his own Instagram story, along with a facepalm emoji.

Over on Bluesky, veteran producer Tim Carvell reposted the same screenshot, writing, “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.’”

On the same platform, current writer and producer Daniel Radosh noted that this decision affects the show’s day-to-day functioning just as much: “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!”

It’s going to take a while for society to really grapple with the effects of cultural deletion at this great a scale, but in the meantime, comedians, journalists, and anyone else who works online, make sure you’re constantly backing up your work! That may be our only weapon against capitalism’s ongoing war against art and knowledge in the months and years to come.