Fox News' 'Gutfeld!' Beats Jon Stewart's Much-hyped 'Daily Show' Return in Ratings With 2.2M Total Viewers
Greg Gutfeld's Fox News show Gutfeld! more than doubled the ratings that Jon Stewart received with his return to Comedy Central's The Daily Show this week, RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.
In a surprising development to come after Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Monday night after leaving the show in 2015, this outlet learned that only 930,000 viewers tuned in to Comedy Central to watch the host’s first episode back after nearly nine years.
Although The Daily Show with Jon Stewart premiered on Monday night on Comedy Central and seven other Paramount channels, and although the show garnered a total 1.9 million viewers across those eight channels, only 930,000 tuned in directly to Comedy Central to watch.
Even more surprising was the fact that, according to Nielsen, only 320,000 viewers from the all-important 25-54 advertisement demographic tuned in to Comedy Central to watch Stewart’s return.
Meanwhile, host Greg Gutfeld’s Fox News show Gutfeld! garnered a whopping 2.2 million total viewers on Monday night – including a modest 328,000 viewers from the 25-54 demographic.
According to the Nielsen numbers, Gutfeld! outpaced The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Monday night by a whopping 140% in total viewers.
It should also be noted that FOX News @ Night, which aired at the same time as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart at 11 PM on Monday, brought in 1.3 million total viewers – nearly as many as the 1.9 million total viewers The Daily Show brought in across eight different channels.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, Stewart returned to the struggling The Daily Show this week after having left the show nearly nine years earlier in 2015.
The ratings for Stewart’s return this week were equal to, if not worse than, the ratings the host saw before he departed the show in 2015.
According to Nielsen, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show received 1.4 million total viewers and 672,000 viewers aged 25-54 across the board in 2014 – approximately 100,000 more viewers than this week’s 1.3 million viewers.
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Meanwhile, The Daily Show garnered an average of 1.3 million total viewers and 597,000 viewers aged 25-54 in 2015 – the same number of total viewers that it received with Stewart’s return on Monday night.
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Still, the ratings The Daily Show brought in with Stewart’s return this week were far and away better than the show garnered under its last full-time host – Trevor Noah – in 2022.
According to Nielsen, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah saw an average of only 385,000 total viewers during Noah’s last season on the show.
Stewart hosted The Daily Show for an impressive 16 years before he left in 2015.
Comedy Central announced last month that Stewart would return this year to help with coverage of the upcoming 2024 presidential election, and the prodigal host is slated to host the show every Monday night this season.
“Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” Chris McCarthy, the president and CEO of Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios, announced in January.
“In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”