The Daily Show circa 2004 (Photo: Comedy Central/The Everett Collection)
First on LateNighter: One of the richest repositories of late-night videos is no longer.
ComedyCentral.com had been home to clips from every episode of The Daily Show since 1999, and the entire run of The Colbert Report, but as of Wednesday morning, the site is gone.
Instead, visitors to the Comedy Central site are greeted with this message: “While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.”
Unfortunately for those in search of older episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, neither can be found on Paramount+.
Other content lost in the purge were clips and full episodes of other short-lived late-night entries like The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the Chris Hardwick-hosted @midnight (predecessor to After Midnight), and Lights Out with David Spade.
This morning’s closure of ComedyCentral.com comes days after two other Paramount-owned sites—MTV.com and CMT.com—also went dark.
The move would appear to be part of continued belt-tightening measures at Paramount, which is more than $14 billion in debt, led by losses at Paramount+ and its aging cable networks. The company had been in merger talks with Skydance up until earlier this month when Shari Redstone, Paramount’s largest shareholder, is reported to have killed the deal at the eleventh hour.
Those hoping to view clips from Comedy Central’s golden age of late-night programming will still find some clips on YouTube, but nothing near the complete collection that had been available on ComedyCentral.com.
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