Jon Stewart makes his return to TV this month with The Problem with Jon Stewart (hopefully without bad theories). The Apple TV+ series, where he will “be in discussion with the people who are impacted by [an] issue — as well as those who have a hand in creating the impact,” is Stewart’s first series since he exited The Daily Show in 2015.
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, he explained why he left when he did.
“The truth is I left The Daily Show for a reason. It didn’t feel like I was singing as joyful a song as I wanted to be singing, but my life was still really good. I had wonderful moments at the show, and I didn’t feel it was a burden. I just didn’t know what else to do with it, this gift — and being allowed to be on TV is a gift,” Stewart explained. He said he “never felt the weight of the world,” but “I felt the weight of the team. I had this group of people who were industrious, talented, funny as f*ck, and raring to go, and my mind was wandering.”
At least nothing happened a year later, in 2016, that would forever changed the course of the country. Speaking of big decisions, Stewart was also asked whether he considered adding a comma to the show’s title, to make it The Problem, with Jon Stewart instead of the winking The Problem of Jon Stewart.
“We’re all talking about, like, ‘OK, well, what do you think about a comma?’ It’s the thing that I love exposing with politics, which is, everything you see is an intention, somebody built it, somebody made a decision. Like, in the Iraq War, that whole, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,’ that came from a meeting. That was a PR guy, and they had meetings every week to talk about the best way to talk about going to war. And that same meeting is the one that we had to figure out what to call this f*cking show. That’s what I love.
The Problem with Jon Stewart (no comma) premieres on September 30 on Apple TV+.
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)