After Thursday, Jessica Williams will be done with The Daily Show. Entertainment Weekly broke the news, including the fact that she’s not decamping for another network. Williams is instead moving on to write, produce, and star in her own half-hour Comedy Central pilot. Per its log line, the show will follow “a politically-minded young woman who may be ‘woke’ but doesn’t know what she’s doing,” which sounds like a great narrative vehicle for her comedy. “The main thing about the show is that I’m excited to, in a silly and funny way, be able to explore ideas of feminism and race and LGBT issues—things that I care about and that I talk about on The Daily Show and that I deal with on 2 Dope Queens,” Williams told EW.
In addition to the pilot and an upcoming film role written specifically for her, Williams said that she intends to follow the lead of her old boss Jon Stewart in her post-Daily Show life. “So since I’m retiring from my late-night job for the time being, I’ll grow out a beard,” she explained. “You can snap me in pictures walking around New York City. I’m going to be, like, a 60-year-old white dude.”
The soon-to-be former correspondent also revealed that she will have a final field piece on Thursday’s Daily Show in which she’ll have a likely horrifying/amusing talk with Bernie Sanders supporters now pledging to vote for Donald Trump.