(Alex Tien, Headline USA) Former national talk show host Jon Stewart‘s streaming program on AppleTV is not off to a great start, according to Bloomberg.
Although the likes of Netflix, AppleTV, Prime Video and Disney+ have all had great amounts of success with movies and TV shows, none of the streaming services have had any luck getting traction for Left-wing talk shows.
Stewart’s flop is yet another example of streaming services failure to attract audiences to their talk shows. Last week, former Fox News host Chris Wallace was reportedly having daily meltdowns due to his own lack of success on the new CNN+ streaming platform.
Wallace was supposed to have been the focal point of the CNN streaming service, but reports have surfaced that there are less than 10,000 subscribers to CNN+.
Stewart’s numbers are a little better than Wallace’s; however, his show seems destined for failure as well. Bloomberg reported an abysmal beginning to Stewart’s show, titled “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
The show’s first episode was seen by just 180,000 US homes in the first week it debuted last fall. That number dropped by 78% to 40,000 by its fifth episode, which aired in early March.
To the surprise of many, Stewart has shown traces of self-awareness, recently thanking anyone who happened to tune into his program. “Thank you for watching but my guess is you didn’t,” he said at the end of his premiere episode.
“You’re probably just going to look at aggregated clips of it somewhere, on YouTube, where you pirate ‘Ted Lasso.’ You don’t even know how to get Apple TV, do you?”
The era of talk show hosts may be coming to a close, unless your name is Tucker Carlson.
“There’s no doubt Jon Stewart made much more of a splash in public discourse 20 years ago than he’s making today,” Stephen Farnsworth, author of a book about late-night TV shows during the Trump era, told Bloomberg.
