“The Daily Show” editor Lauren Beckett Jackson has one word to describe Jon Stewart‘s return to the program. “Electric, I think to say the least,” she tells Gold Derby at our Meet the Experts: TV Editors panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). “We were not under the impression that he was going to be coming back. He had the show on Apple TV, so we were like, ‘It’s not happening. We’re gonna do this guest host thing.’ And the day they announced, he came out and we had a big meeting in the studio and everyone just kind of blew up because not only is he a legend here obviously, but it meant that this next year was going to be something really, really special and that everyone in the room was going to be part of it. So it was just really exciting to have him back and to be a mentor too to a lot of the new correspondents we have on the show. We got some new talent this year. And also having his voice this particular year being an election year, it felt right, it felt perfect.”
Stewart, who left the show in 2015, returned this year to host the Monday episodes. Correspondents host the rest of the week, as has been the norm since Trevor Noah, Stewart’s successor, ended his tenure in 2022. Editing different hosts’ styles has been fun, Jackson, who joined “The Daily Show” in 2020, says, because each host brings their own brand to the show. “A lot of the time in rehearsal it’s fun to watch. Anyone can come to rehearsal if you have time,” she shares. “Hearing how they react and respond to certain jokes, kind of getting that timing down of when we wanna push into something or take a step back. All of those things are built into the type of correspondent that we have.”
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“The Daily Show” has an editing team of 10 to cover all the evolving pieces of a live-to-tape talk show from headlines and sketches to field pieces and interviews. Sometimes Jackson, who received an Emmy nomination the past two years with her “Daily Show” colleagues, has no idea what she’s working on that day until she turns on her computer. And she loves it.
“I’d come in and they’d be like, ‘All right, Lauren, you’re on the interview today’ or ‘you’re on headlines today.’ As soon as that first Slack message comes in, you’re just going, going, going until rehearsal and then taping,” she explains. “It feels very much like we’re on this constant wheel rotating through and you’re gonna get to do four or five different things in one week that will air that night. It’s insane.”
It’s safe to say one can never be bored as an editor of “The Daily Show,” especially when breaking news happens right before taping. Then it’s all hands on deck. “We have a ton of producers who are going through and watching breaking news as it’s happening, pulling sources for the best quality that we can get for this clip,” Jackson says. “Then the writers have to come in and we’re going to rewrite jokes on the fly, we gotta include X, Y and Z now, and kind of getting the correspondent or our host up to speed that day. So there’s just a lot of moving parts that happen at the same time, but there is an energy and fluidity that happen when there is breaking news because we’re all kind of waiting for it, so it’s an adrenaline rush.”
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