How Comedy Central Lost Its Mojo and What It Means for the Rest of Cable

No one at Comedy Central is laughing at the year the network is having, and last week was downright depressing.

A week ago Monday, Comedy Central announced it was cancelling Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show at the end of the week. The 11:30 p.m. show, which replaced The Colbert Report in early 2015, was averaging 494,000 viewers a night and only 122,000 among 18- to 34-year-olds.

On Wednesday night, Amy Schumer — the star of Inside Amy Schumer and the biggest name still at the network following defections over the last two years by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and others — went on Twitter and said this:

She was responding to incendiary comments by Kurt Metzger, a stand-up comic and writer on her show. On Thursday, Charlie Rose posted an advance clip from its interview with Schumer set to air that Friday evening in which she said: “Right now, there’s no plans for the TV show to come back any time in the near future.” It was a gut punch to Comedy Central, which had ordered Season 5 months ago despite Season 4 ratings that were off considerably from Season 3.

And that was just last week. Since Jon Stewart ended his 16-year run as host of The Daily Show on August 6, 2015, Comedy Central has taken enough hits to relaunch as a boxing channel:

• In September, Key & Peele ended its run as the best sketch series since HBO’s Mr. Show in the ’90s.
• At the end of December, year-end Nielsen ratings showed Comedy Central down 19 percent from 2014. Trevor Noah’s Daily Show numbers through the end of were barely half of Jon Stewart’s numbers from earlier in the year.
• In January, NBCUniversal launched the Seeso streaming service as a direct competitor to Comedy Central for both talent — including former Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac — and viewers.
• In February, Andy Daly decided to end Review — one of the best shows of 2015 — with an abbreviated third season, and former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee premiered Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS to rapturous reviews.
• In March, Comedy Central cancelled the one-season animated series Moonbeam City, which had A-list voice talent like Rob Lowe and Elizabeth Banks but didn’t register with critics or viewers.
• In May, Comedy Central president Michele Ganeless resigned and was was replaced by the network’s programming chief. (Trade site TheWrap led its story: “Good luck turning this around, Kent Alterman.”)
• In July, the network was shut out of an Emmy nomination for outstanding variety talk series. The Daily Show won in that category last year, and either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report had won in the variety category, which was split last year into variety talk and variety sketch, every year since 2003. The favorite this year is HBO’s Last Week Tonight, which is hosted by former Daily Show correspondent John Oliver.

Most of the autopsies have focused on Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, but the fault falls disproportionately on Noah because his show leads the hour. The Ringer’s Alison Herman: “Noah still hasn’t solidified the international perspective that would supposedly define his Daily Show.” Time’s Daniel D’Addario: “Noah is too laconic by half, checked-out of a presidential election his whole shtick is to pretend (or acknowledge) that he doesn’t understand by virtue of his South African citizenship.” Uproxx’s Steven Hyden: “Noah is quite likable and he’s grown more assured as a host, but he’s competing against more seasoned political comedians like Oliver, Bee, Bill Maher, and Seth Meyers.”

Daily Show and Nightly Show are blander and less a part of the social conversation than their predecessors at Comedy Central and blander and less a part of the social conversation than their competitors on other networks, but I’m not sure hiring different hosts would have mattered that much.

John Oliver on HBO and Samantha Bee on TBS have the advantage of being event programming: they can focus their considerable talents on one good half-hour a week, they own their respective nights (Oliver on Sunday, Bee on Monday), their shows are oriented around their presentation rather than around guests, and their respective networks can orient their marketing machines around that one night. The network late-night hosts are on weeknights but have the advantage of bigger platforms with lots of viewing inertia.

The unfortunate truth for Comedy Central is that the ratings decline is structural and likely irreversible. Comedy Central is part of the cable bundle, and the number of households that subscribe to that bundle through cable, satellite and phone providers — roughly 94 million according to Leichtman Research Group — has declined by 1.1 million subscribers over the last year.

According to Nielsen, primetime viewership at the top 35 cable networks is down less than 1 percent so far this year vs. the same period a year ago, and viewership by millennials — those 18- to 34-year-olds that advertisers pay the most to reach — is down 7 percent. Factoring out gains by CNN, Fox News and MSNBC that will return to earth after the election, the top networks are actually down 5 percent overall and down 10 percent with millennials.

Comedy Central’s primetime viewership is down 15 percent so far this year vs. the same period a year ago. Among 18- to 34-year-olds, it’s down a staggering 24 percent. Many of the viewers who checked out when Jon Stewart left The Daily Show have dropped their cable service entirely, and those who are in the bundle are watching less of it and more of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and a dozen smaller services.

“They’re seeing their ratings shrink a lot as their younger-skewing audience is eating up their content in other places,” SNL Kagan analyst Scott Robson told The Hollywood Reporter. “There are increasing subscriber losses and an overall decline in ratings, so you’re seeing two forces working against them.”

Those same structural changes are playing out right now at ESPN and are much of the reason why NBC’s Olympics ratings are down from four years ago. The ratings declines are hitting Comedy Central so much harder than networks like TBS and AMC in large part because Comedy Central’s viewers are so much younger than those other networks’ viewers.

Comedy Central has had some success getting in front of millennials who don’t subscribe to the cable bundle, including a big expansion of Daily Show‘s audience onto YouTube and Hulu, but don’t expect a new host or a new show to bring back the glory days while 1.1 million subscribers a year are cutting the cord.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.