The host’s biweekly issues-comedy show has good intentions, and sometimes good jokes.
Calling your new public-affairs-comedy show “The Problem With Jon Stewart” is a provocation and a pre-emption. It sounds like the title of a think-piece that could have been written at any point over the last two decades, accusing the one-time “Daily Show” host of false equivalence, or partisanship, or naïveté. Jon Stewart knows all this, the title says; he has even teed up your hack joke for you. You are free to title your review “The Problem With ‘The Problem With Jon Stewart,’” hit “Publish” and call it a day. This kind of defensive self-deprecation can be, well, another problem with Jon Stewart. Even as he was reinventing political and media criticism on Comedy Central’s fake newscast (before “fake news” was rebranded), he had a ready deflection for both critiques and praise: We’re just a comedy show. As he told Tucker Carlson on CNN’s “Crossfire” in 2004 — a confrontation that only burnished his reputation as a 21st-century Howard Beale — “The show that leads into me is puppets making prank phone calls.” With “The Problem,” appearing every other Thursday on Apple TV+, this is no longer true, and not just in the literal sense that on streaming TV there are no lead-ins. In stature and in the new show’s spirit, he is now a pie thrower with a purpose. Stewart has joined the ranks of personages like David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, creating high-minded programming for streaming TV. He is an éminence grise, though he makes his scruffy grise-iness a punchline. “This is what I look like now,” he tells his audience. “I don’t like it either.” “The Problem” is his attempt to step up to that status and make a serious difference, albeit with one hand on the seltzer spritzer just in case. In its first two episodes, his show is “The Daily Show” but longer (around 45 minutes), more sustained and passionate in its attention and less funny — often intentionally, sometimes not. The structure, Stewart says in the first episode, was inspired by a 2010 “Daily Show” in which a panel of 9/11 responders talked about their lingering health problems and Congress’s failure to approve help for them. Stewart became an advocate, on air and in Washington, for the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. “The Problem” teams up the satirist Stewart with the advocate Stewart. There are comic rants, taped sketches and the occasional off-color joke about the snake on the far-right symbol the Gadsden flag.
