For those of you who miss the good ol’ days of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is the old host is coming back. Stewart will host the show Mondays during this presidential election cycle, starting Feb. 12, and be an executive producer.
The bad news is the show isn’t coming back to CTV or CTV Comedy. Paramount confirms the show’s Canadian rights will remain with the Paramount+ streaming service, where it had moved since the end of the writers strike.
The show will be available on Paramount+ the day after it airs on Comedy Central.
Many Canadians (including myself) were confused when they heard the show had resumed production in October but CTV continued airing The Big Bang Theory reruns at 12:05am weekdays. Bell Media would only say it no longer had the rights to the show.
Then Paramount+, a service few Canadians have heard of much less subscribe to, announced it was adding The Daily Show last month. But within weeks, the show disappeared from there too. Paramount told me it’s because they weren’t producing new episodes at the time. (Why they couldn’t have archived episodes available is unclear.)
Today’s news confirms that even with Stewart’s return, the show won’t be widely available in Canada. Paramount+, which also includes Yellowstone, Yellowstone spinoffs, a bunch of series you’ve never heard of and that Sylvester Stallone project you may have seen ads for, costs $10/month directly, or through Apple TV+ or Amazon Prime Video.
Bell Media has complained recently to the CRTC and others that big U.S. streaming services are unfairly competing for Canadian rights to shows, making it harder for Bell to make money. It used the example of Star Trek, which is also owned by Paramount. Though CTV and Space/CTV Sci-Fi has been Star Trek’s home since the days of The Next Generation, expect future Trek series to be exclusive to Paramount+ in Canada. (The service already has all the Star Trek series, but for now at least those rights are mostly non-exclusive.)
You can get paramount plus for $50 for a year until February 1.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2023/12/13/paramount-canada-is-offering-50-percent-off-its-annual-plans/
My heart bleeds for Bell. Their key content suppliers are now competitors who won’t sell some content to Bell. Cry me a river. Bell should have seen this coming at least 10 years ago and should have invested in original content. They didn’t and now their solution is to beg the CRTC to fix it for them. If CTV shut down I wouldn’t miss it.
Happy to see Jon Stewart back doing what he is best at, being a pain in everyone’s butt. Good on him, can’t wait for new episodes.
Bell Media is once again playing the sore loser card. At some point, they are going to wake up and realize that regulatory capture can only hold back the tides so long. Producers no longer need the distribution that CTV offers. They can reach more people, in more places, directly, without having to split the profits.
Broadcast is at a dead end, supported only by the regulator capture that the big companies have used to keep them in business. They are pushing hard for producers to be stopped from directly selling their content to consumers, begging the CRTC to force Canadian content rules and some form of digital sim sub onto these companies, so that Bell and their Oligopoly player friends can continue to shear the sheep (consumers).
The end of that road is arriving quickly.
I have Paramount+. The Taylor Sheridan franchises (including Tulsa King). Seal Team. Special Ops. Lots of movies. It is the westerns for me. Even the modern day universes are basically westerns. Hell or High Water is a great movie in that same genre. Next for Sheridan is Empire of the Summer Moon. Not necessarily interested in watching day old news but for Jon Stewart, I might give it a try
I firmly believe that Canadian executives should be more invested in creating local content.
However Canadian businesses are, as a rule, deathly afraid of doing anything that might fail, and so they never try.
Paramount+ will air TDS the “day after”. Does tgat mean as of 1201am it will be available to stream???
If not, than what time is it available to watch?
The Feb 12 episode will be the highest rated late night show in years but it will bot be seen live in Canada?!? This is a throwback to the original Daily Show. Ao stupid.