The Daily Show and The Colbert Report
Comedy Central
8 and 8:30, 10 and 10:30 and/or 11 and 11:30 tonight, depending on your hook-up
Oh, Gods of Pay Cable Goodness, thankyouthankyouthankyou for ending the summer vacation for what's consistently the freshest, funniest and thought-provokingest hour of satirical television (excluding Brian Lamb's Def Book Jam, of course). These past two weeks have been hell around Hacienda de Cocaine as the absence of non-rerunned Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert has caused me to switch over to the NBA playoffs, movie channels and even Tawny Kitaen's meltdown on The Surreal Life. Sure, there is a healthy side to this, as I've fallen in love all over again with Charles Barkley, Christian Bale (Batman Begins—awesome!) and Chuck Finley. But without my regular fake news fix, I've been so out of sorts that people have gone to calling me Cheney. Now, it's not like I'm ignoring the fact that the Daily jumped the shark about the time Steve Carell left or that it's apparent the best Daily writers migrated over to Colbert. But even the anemic Daily is better than no Daily at all, if for nothing more than the last 30 seconds, when the two fake anchors have their little what's-coming-up exchange. And Fonzi'd over the tank or no, there's still no beating the Daily at election time. Say, isn't one of those coming up? Good thing Jon and Stephen are back so I know what's going on in the world again.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.