Culture

Comedy Central SKY Channel 10
7:30pm
(5/5)


Welcome to a new section in the illustrious Critic: a section entirely dedicated to reviewing the televisual! We’re going to take recent events, programmes – practically anything compelling or disturbing from the television world – and steer you around their towering peaks and abysmal lows. So, what to start with? Why not with the apotheoses of television? The height, the pinnacle, the apex of mainstream programming; we can look down with contempt on all the other shows from its vertiginous heights in televisual Olympus. Okay maybe we’re overdoing it. In any case, after a bit of strained mentation, we came up with: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Why is this one of the best shows on television, you ask? Well ...
It revolves, as you probably know, around the eponymous presenter taking stabs at everything from pop culture to current events. It bounces from relatively in-depth criticism of news reporting to risible mock news reports while providing interviews with prominent journalists, senators, and public intellectuals. And he can say fuck. Not many news programmes can boast that that is part of their persuasive, or ironic, arsenal. The Daily Show stands out because it’s a remedy to the sententious journalists, oblique spin-doctors, and bullshit artists (and their often insipid coverage of current events), that clog the arteries of mainstream television. It’s one of the best things the mainstream system’s produced, and providentially, it’s something that isn’t completely up its own ass.
Stewart’s also managed to pop some tethered gas balloons of personalities in his time: he’s made the bellicose and mendacious Bill O’Reilly admit he’s “confused;” told the abysmal presenters from the ‘news’ show Crossfire, to their faces, they should stop what they’re doing “for the good of America;” systematically stomped on the cult of fear and panic produced by the Fox News Channel (along with it’s Palin-esque cronies); and methodically compared the earlier statements of perfidious politicians to their present day incarnations, with penetrating and revealing humour. And he did all this without being a total dick. So it seems like this show can do more than the news can: it can be funny and keep you informed. The lugubrious, wooden-faced pronouncements of over-starched reporters are unfortunately a necessity for modern society, but seeing politicians and journalists alike come up against a meticulous yet goofy commentator really makes my day. 
It isn’t perfect, of course, despite the rating below, but it certainly is a great start – and it’s something that we desperately need here in NZ. I really hope that John Campbell stops revealing “What’s In Our Chips” and goes the way of the Stewarts and the Colberts. I really do. Because this is unlikely to happen, I hope you’ll email, write, tweet, or shout down C4 and TV3 about dropping the The Daily Show from their weekly programming. However, for those of you stacking SKY on top of your course approved costs, you can still check it out on Comedy Central, 7.30pm, every evening. So we’ll try to lead by this example: review television stuff with ladles of irony, limit the babbling, and relish poking fun at the most annoying people contained within the TV world!