Jon Stewart is staying with “The Daily Show” through the next presidential election.
Comedy Central announced on Monday that Mr. Stewart signed a new deal that will keep him as host of the late-night show for one day a week through December 2028.
In February 2024, after a nine-year absence, Mr. Stewart returned to hosting “The Daily Show,” but only on Mondays. Since then, ratings for the show have surged, particularly on his night. New episodes of “The Daily Show” are averaging more than a million viewers, the show’s best performance since 2019.
Mr. Stewart’s monologues have also been a hit online. According to an analysis by the website LateNighter, they accounted for 14 of the 20 most-watched YouTube clips last year among late night hosts.
Mr. Stewart’s two-year deal is a shot in the arm for the late-night-show genre, where cancellations have been piling up amid significant downturns in both viewership and advertising revenue.
CBS left the business of making new original comedy series in the late-night hours in May after the cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” Whether ABC will stay in the business is uncertain. ABC, owned by Disney, is negotiating with Jimmy Kimmel over the future of his show; he is under contract through May. Dana Walden, the president of Disney, recently said late night was a “very challenging day part.”
“We’re trying to work through it and make sense of both, what does Jimmy want, what’s the right thing to do, and what’s the right thing for our business?” she said at a Bloomberg conference this month.
When Mr. Colbert’s show was canceled, there was plenty of speculation that it was for political reasons, so that the owners of Paramount — which owns CBS and Comedy Central — could get approval from the Trump administration to complete a merger with Skydance. (Mr. Colbert, like Mr. Stewart and Mr. Kimmel and nearly every late-night host, is an ardent Trump critic.)
CBS’s chief at the time, George Cheeks, rejected that speculation, saying he canceled the show purely because of economics.
Mr. Cheeks, now the chief content officer for the television division at Skydance, the new name given to the recent combination of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, said in a statement on Monday that he was “excited to continue our partnership with Jon.”
“Jon Stewart is a generational talent, and ‘The Daily Show’ continues to be one of the most influential franchises on television and a cornerstone of Comedy Central,” he continued.
In May, when Mr. Stewart visited “The Late Show” for one of its final episodes, Mr. Colbert told him, “You’re going to be the only one in late night for the CBS-Paramount Skydance corporation.”
Mr. Stewart replied: “The only saving grace is that I don’t think Trump has cable.”
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