Comedy Central Website Deleted, Tons Of Exclusive Clips From Decades Disappear
If you’re one of the millions of television viewers who grew up consuming the nightly musings of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and other hilarious comedians on Comedy Central throughout the 2000s, brace yourself for some terrible news. Paramount has shut down the Comedy Central website, which contained a backlog of thousands of episodes of the network’s classic series that have aired since 1999.
Most of the content lost in the site’s shuttering is not available to stream, meaning these episodes are now effectively being hidden from new viewers.
The Golden Age Of Comedy Central Is Gone
While you might not think of nightly news comedy programming such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report as binge-worthy television, the era of those programs airing back-to-back episodes has widely been regarded as the golden age of Comedy Central. For over a decade, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert offered a hilarious one-two punch of impeccable sarcasm, biting satire, and side-splitting jabs about the growing absurdity of the American political system.
Only Clips Survive
With thousands of episodes of both shows purged from the web, the only way to catch these comedy classics now is to find a friend who had the foresight to tape their favorite episodes and digitally hoard the data for years to come. Some humorous short-form clips of the classic Comedy Central years are available on YouTube, though these clips offer an incredibly small sample size of the network’s greatest hits.
Other Classic Shows Gone Forever
Other shows impacted by the Comedy Central site’s shuttering include The Opposition With Jordan Klepper, the original run of @Midnight, and the short-lived Daily Show sister series The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore. Luckily, shows such as South Park have their own independent websites where fans can stream old episodes for free, while other Comedy Central programs like Key & Peele have been ported over to streaming services.
Colbert And Stewart Are Back On The Air
The only real silver lining to this situation is that Jon Stewart is currently back at the Daily Show desk, albeit only in a limited capacity, and Colbert has now taken over the desk at CBS’ The Late Show. While it’s nice to have new material from each of these flagship jokesters, long-time fans will surely want to be able to go back and examine their earlier work from time to time, making this Comedy Central purge a major problem.
With any luck, perhaps these shows will be ported over to Paramount+ or even Peacock, though fans shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for this to happen.
The Age Of Vanishing Media
The streaming model has seen an alarming number of movies and TV shows wiped off of the face of the earth, as studios continue to take fully-completed projects and shelve them indefinitely.
The Warner Bros-owned Max is the biggest culprit of this industry-wide issue at this time, as films such as Batgirl and Coyote Vs. Acme have been held hostage with no sign of release, despite being fully completed and ready to air. Now it seems that Comedy Central is following suit, blocking some of its most popular and beloved shows from seeing the light of day.
