The Daily Show’s Tacky New Set

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.