Following the lead of Letterman, Leno and others, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert will be back on the air next week – airing new but writer-less episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on both Comedy Network and CTV, with an assist on the former by Tom Green.
The series have been in re-runs here and on Comedy Central since the start of the WGA strike in November, but recently announced plans to return to air, though it remains to be seen how the heavily scripted talk shows will manage without writers.
‘We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence,’ said Stewart and Colbert in a joint statement.
On Comedy, the Daily and Colbert shows will be preceded by Tom Green’s House Tonight, an hour-long talker hosted by the Ottawa-born comic. Green has been on and off the airwaves for several years, but has recently been running a mini talk show online at www.tomgreen.com.
Green’s new show will air weeknights at 10 pm ET, leading into the Daily and Colbert shows Mondays through Thursdays. On CTV, Stewart’s and Colbert’s shows will return to their pre-strike time slots at 12 am ET and 12:30 am ET respectively.
Reports from Hollywood predict that, without writers, the shows will have to do without trademark bits such as Stewart’s opening take on the day’s headlines and Colbert’s monologue, ‘The Word.’ It has also been speculated that The Daily Show could fill time by re-running segments from before the strike.
This week saw the return of late-night heavy hitters including The Late Show with David Letterman, seen here on the OMNIs, and both Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, which air on the A-Channels. Letterman, whose show is produced though his Worldwide Pants company, returned with his writers thanks to a separate deal struck with the WGA. O’Brien and Leno are going without, because their shows are produced by NBC.
From Playback Daily
