Comedy Central’s website has been shut down, meaning that decades of clips and full episodes of beloved shows are no longer available online.
For years, the Comedy Central website was home to a large amount of content, including clips from every episode of The Daily Show since 1999, the full run of The Colbert Report, and many more shows. Now, the site simply redirects to Paramount+, with a message explaining that “while episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website,” fans can still watch the channel through their TV providers or find “many seasons of Comedy Central shows” on Paramount+.
The only problem? Many shows that were offered on Comedy Central’s website aren’t actually available to stream. The Daily Show only offers its 28th and 29th season on Paramount+, and others titles — like The Colbert Report, The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, @midnight, and Lights Out with David Spade — aren’t available at all.
The take down of Comedy Central’s website arrives just days after Paramount made similar moves with other websites, like MTV.com and CMT.com. All of this seems to be part of the company’s strategy as they’re navigating financial difficulties, with more than $14 billion in debt and lower-than-expected returns from their streaming services.
For those still looking for content from the now-missing years of Comedy Central shows, there are still some clips available on YouTube. But overall, this seems to be the latest instance in the unfortunate trend of streaming services removing TV shows and films, which Consequence’s Liz Shannon Miller explained, isn’t just diminishing the amount of shows we have access to, but is quickly eroding fans’ trust.