“Well, it doesn’t get boring here with all the talent that passes through,” says Emmy-winning “The Daily Show” director David Paul Meyer about how the show has evolved since host Trevor Noah left at the end of 2022. Noah was followed by a rotating series of comedian guest hosts, and then the show’s correspondents at the anchor desk. “It’s been really interesting to see how they approach the script and how they perform it.” We talked with Meyer as part of our “Meet the Experts” TV directors panel. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“Each person has their own style,” Meyer adds. “Luckily with the correspondents, a lot of them I have worked with over the years from just being at the show.” The biggest change to adapt to was actually the return of Jon Stewart, who revolutionized TV political comedy during his original run on the show and returned to the desk once a week for 2024’s presidential election season.
It has been a “real thrill to work with him and learn how he approaches the work.” Stewart’s “Daily Show” comeback was a “big surprise,” but “seeing his mind work is incredible … He’s so focused on the moment, and the performance, and what he’s saying and doing, and how the audience is reacting, or anticipating how the home audience might react, that you can feel that he’s sort of melding together the script and his internal Jon dialogue into something really special.”
In early 2024 “The Daily Show” also celebrated an Emmy win for Best Talk Series honoring Noah’s farewell season on the program. It was the show’s first victory under Noah’s tenure and marked Meyer’s first Emmy Award, as a supervising producer. “It felt like a really great thing that the show could share in as a whole,” Meyer says. “And then also simultaneously there was a special sort of arc for Trevor and I, and what we had gone through as friends and colleagues and working together, even before ‘The Daily Show’ … It was just a great culmination of a lot of things … It was awesome.”
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