Reinventing Television (Jon Stewart article in Wired)

[tuvor]

In case you missed the hard copy version last month

Wake up, television executives of America: Jon Stewart - the wiseacre host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show - knows more about your business than you do. Sure, The Daily Show may just seem like a smart comedy program on basic cable; nothing more than good political satire and a spot-on parody of TV news pieties. But it's also a demonstration of television done right. In the six years since Stewart took over, the audience for The Daily Show has grown almost threefold to 1.4 million viewers a night. It boasts a legion of young, smart fans who are among the most demographically desirable audiences in the industry - further collapsing the caste distinctions between networks and cable. It has raised the bar for tie-ins, with a best-seller (America has sold a stunning 2.5 million copies), a hit DVD (Indecision 2004), and - starting in October - a full-fledged spinoff (The Colbert Report). And The Daily Show may be the most popular TV program on the Internet:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/stewart.html

[sarcasmo]

1. #1 Comedy show on the boob tube, IMHO.

[Rick Myers]

2. That's a great article, a must-read!

:thumbsup: