I turned on yesterday’s episode of The Daily Show today, and noticed that they had made some sig­nif­i­cant changes to the open­ing sequence. Not only that, but the set had been entirely revamped. Here:

At first I was happy about it — it’s glassy and mod­ern and makes the old set look cheap by com­par­i­son. But there are a lot of new visual ele­ments meant to com­ple­ment the set that just end up being a tremen­dous mess. Look at the cor­re­spon­dent con­ver­sa­tion win­dow thing for example:

The weird orangey-red and the blue are bad enough, but then there’s all that gold trim, and the light blue hue of John Oliver’s title and “LONDON,” the red-blue gra­di­ent behind “LIVE,” and the new, awk­ward Daily Show logo font, which has only been adopted by select ele­ments of the show. They look like a pair of ’84 Topps cards.

Then, dur­ing the inter­view (where both Jon and guest are turned 90 degrees from the audi­ence, due to the new desk), they even intro­duce a swoosh­ing sound effect with the appear­ance of cap­tions. Keep watch­ing after the first one, it hap­pens again less than a minute later:

It all just kind of sucks.