Late-night TV is focusing on politics more than ever. Here’s why.

Late-night TV and politics have always been tightly linked, and not just through easy monologue jokes or soft-launch candidacy announcements.

In 1959, for example, Tonight Show host Jack Paar interviewed Fidel Castro on Cuban soil in the middle of the Cold War; in 1961, he broadcast live from the construction of the Berlin Wall. In the early 1970s, Dick Cavett hosted the infamous Vietnam War debate between current Secretary of State John Kerry and fellow veteran John O’Neill, and later lambasted the Senate Watergate Committee while broadcasting from a hearing room in Washington, DC.

But in more recent years, late night’s political interest has moved to cable. With the likes of David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Fallon guiding late night at the broadcast level, the political engagement demonstrated by Paar and Cavett fell by the wayside on network television — and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s block of programming on Comedy Central became the site for a proper mix of political commentary and entertainment, while events like 2010’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear accentuated their desire to raise real awareness of contemporary problems in Washington. Though modern politicians like President Obama now make the rounds on all the late-night shows, it was their stints on The Daily Show or The Colbert Report that were most anticipated (particularly by younger viewers).

2015 saw more host turnover than any year in recent memory. And although Letterman’s departure from The Late Show and late-night TV in general is the move with the most historical import, it’s the influence of another host who said goodbye — Stewart — that seemed to stretch the furthest this year.

Jon Stewart's exit from The Daily Show helped to spur late night's renewed interest in politics

When Stewart announced his impending departure from The Daily Show in February by noting that the show "doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host," the news didn’t come exactly as a surprise. Not because he took a long break in 2013 to direct Rosewater, but mostly because he seemed worn down — by a polarized government, an incessantly craven 24-hour news cycle, and a prevailing sense of cynicism. Yes, toward the end of Stewart's tenure, his reaction moved from awe to anger more readily, but his ability to expose and assess bureaucratic fallacies is now inspiring another era of late-night TV that took off this year — one with an ardent and broader interest in the political sphere.

This rededication to political critique stems at least in part from the aforementioned host turnover. Three of the new hosts this year — Colbert, Larry Wilmore, and Trevor Noah — are former Daily Show correspondents who not only improved their craft by working in a productive creative environment but also benefited from the more overtly political realm of basic cable. None of them owes his career to Stewart or The Daily Show, but all three have successfully translated their experiences on that show to bigger platforms, whether on Comedy Central or CBS.

The swap of the year came on CBS’s Late Show, with Letterman's retirement making way for the energetic Colbert. Transitioning into a new role as "himself" hasn’t been much of a challenge for Colbert, who has found smart ways to package commentary of the election cycle to broadcast audiences. Rarely does it seem like Colbert is playing it safe, whether he’s slaying media coverage of Donald Trump by acknowledging his own obsession with the Donald or going full nerd by cosplaying as Stanley Tucci’s flamboyant character from The Hunger Games in celebration of a presidential hopeful losing hope.

But Colbert’s best work has come in his interviews, where his passion for politics makes up for any deficiencies in technique. Conversations with Vice President Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, and Trump made headlines, but even less flashy instances like his brief chat with presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illustrate a fidelity to inform and contextualize current events without relying on the same tired talking heads.

At Comedy Central, Wilmore and Noah have provided more than hollow diversity. When it debuted in January, Wilmore’s The Nightly Show immediately differentiated itself as a destination for sharp conversations about subjects that unfortunately defined America this year: racism, hate speech, and police brutality. Early in his tenure, Wilmore jokingly announced that "all of the good Bad Race Stuff happened already," but his best moments ultimately came in response to the controversial Ferguson police report, cable news’s coverage of protests in Baltimore, racist chants at a University of Oklahoma fraternity, and the Democratic Party’s uneasy relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement.

One of The Nightly Show's biggest strengths is its roundtable discussion, where Wilmore pokes and prods his guests into talking about big topics without dominating the conversation with his own takes. While this approach occasionally leads to some panelists (usually comedians) bowling over their peers, it also produces relatively honest discussions like February’s panel with four black women discussing dating and interracial relationships.

And as The Nightly Show was settling into its own, Noah took the reins of Comedy Central’s flagship program The Daily Show and spent the fall steadily growing more comfortable in the chair previously filled by Stewart. Noah hasn’t been shy about playing up the "global perspective" he supposedly brings to America, most notably in a segment comparing Trump to the worst dictators from his home continent of Africa. Yet, he hasn’t just used his outsider status for mocking equivalences. Noah’s breakdown of the American response to the terror attacks in Paris began with a playful impersonation of the ISIS helpline, but ultimately became a compelling and moving performance from someone who, just a few months into the job, was already affected by the depths of fearmongering and dangerous rhetoric employed in this country.

Of course, late-night TV’s commitment to starting a real dialogue about worldwide affairs wasn't limited to those hosts in new positions. Emboldened by his success last year, John Oliver went longer and deeper to lambaste government surveillance programs, sex education, sports stadium financing, and many countries' treatment of refugees on HBO's Last Week Tonight. Oliver's detailed examinations are more journalism than jokes and sometimes run 20 minutes or longer — a style that, on the surface, doesn’t work in a world of short attention spans and lip-syncing celebrities. And yet, Last Week Tonight spent 2015 further entrenching itself as the heir apparent to the spreadability of The Daily Show.

Oliver was initially able to workshop his acrid, brazen tone during his 2013 run as substitute host on The Daily Show. And now his angry takedowns are prime shareable content for those who spent the past 15 years viewing Stewart as the go-to source for political commentary.

Viewing patterns and current events help, too — but even "easy" topics like the 2016 election are pushing hosts to try new things

I don’t want to overstate Stewart’s influence too much here. While it’s probably fair to suggest that the lasting success of Stewart’s Daily Show — and subsequently The Colbert Report — convinced Comedy Central to stay on the politically engaged track, or assured CBS that Colbert could transform his style just enough to appeal to a broader audience, the business of late night is different than it was even five years ago.

Like with all TV shows, networks recognize that viewers aren’t necessarily going to watch late-night shows live anymore. Many of us are using that time to catch up on other things saved on our DVRs, and the sheer quantity of late-night programming between 11 pm and 1:15 am makes it challenging for even the most die-hard fans to keep up with multiple shows in a given week. As a result, these shows are watched the next morning over breakfast and dispersed via social media in piecemeal clip form.

The diminishing of live viewership means that late-night shows likely have more opportunities to try different things, or potentially to be more explicitly political or controversial. The Daily Show has proven that amid all the clutter, people will share clips of well-crafted, politically oriented material. So there’s sufficient precedent that suggests politics is a great way to build your show’s brand.

Also good for a late-night show’s brand? Campaigns and dysfunction. With the 2016 presidential campaign cycle ratcheting up to overdrive and the near-constant barrage of terrible world events, the news provided hosts ample material to excavate and lampoon this year. Nightly monologues have been littered with riffs from the campaign trail, extended jokes about the length of televised debates, and, of course, the unavoidable Trump of it all. The unfortunate reality of late night is that bad things make for great TV.

It helps, however, that many of the current hosts are willing to engage with sociocultural issues in their own ways.

For instance, Seth Meyers is part of a different but similarly influential lineage of social commentators: Saturday Night Live head writers and Weekend Update hosts. This year, Meyers made an important change — ditching the monologue and heading straight for the desk — and used it as a reason to give important non-Trump issues like the recent Paris climate change summit, campaign contributions, and Houston’s equal rights ordinance what he’s calling "a closer look." While these segments might recall Weekend Update, in truth they display that, like many of his peers with much better time slots, Meyers has grown especially skilled at mixing jokes and commentary without devaluing the significance of a given topic.

Even Conan O’Brien did his best work of 2015 by going boldly where no late-night host had gone since Paar in 1959: Cuba. Conan isn’t interested in "being political" like many of his late-night brethren, but in doing what he does best — awkwardly experiencing a new culture — he used his segments from Cuba to give viewers a playful but not exploitive snapshot of a world that is sort of new to us, too.

And yet, Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is the current late-night champion

Regardless of whether or not they're inspired by Stewart and The Daily Show, there’s one thing all late-night hosts have in common: They’re losing to Jimmy Fallon and The Tonight Show. While many of Fallon's competitors have more directly engaged with the world outside entertainment, his Tonight Show continues to be an oasis of celebrity games, musical performances, and genre-hopping impressions.

This is not a bad thing; Fallon and his team have a knack for producing segments that suggest anything can happen while also keeping high-profile guests very comfortable. Likewise, his energy and enthusiasm are regularly unmatched — even when Nicole Kidman is revealing details of their botched first date in one of the year’s best segments.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the differences between Fallon and his competitors when his soft, playful approach extends to his recent interviews with Trump and Hillary Clinton. In both candidates’ appearances on The Tonight Show, Fallon leaned very heavily on his impression of Trump, producing an admittedly amusing but toothless bit involving Trump and a mirror and an even less successful phone call sketch with Clinton that wouldn’t have been out of place on a middling episode of SNL.

It’s even more telling that Fallon spent 2015 padding his lead. This fall, The Tonight Show averaged nearly 4 million viewers and a 1.10 rating in the 18-to-49 demographic. Colbert’s Late Show, meanwhile, averaged 3.14 million viewers and a .77 in the 18-to-49 demographic — and those numbers include the higher ratings Colbert scored in his earliest days behind the Late Show desk, when viewers were curious to see how he’d transition to broadcast and whether he could replace Letterman.

This is in addition to Fallon’s dominance in the digital sphere, where his pop culture riffs are tailor-made for piecemeal consumption. (For example, Fallon’s segments with Trump have roughly double the YouTube views of Colbert's segments with Trump.) Meanwhile, both Wilmore and Noah’s shows have predictably turned in lower ratings than their predecessors in the same time slots, and are similarly struggling to penetrate the online conversation as regularly. Turns out, it’s hard to replace legends.

The Tonight Show’s continued success — and the growing prominence of Jimmy Kimmel, a host who privileges rubbing shoulders with celebrities and, lately, debuting blockbuster trailers — demonstrates that variety show–esque products from Fallon, Kimmel, and the car karaoke king James Corden are still very appealing to viewers. This isn’t new. People have always preferred to watch inoffensive shows before bed (this is the recipe for Jay Leno’s success), and of course we like to share funny, brief videos featuring celebrities doing odd stuff.

However, in such a tumultuous year, with so many great shows that are more politically engaged, one has to wonder if the audience is as worn out as Stewart appeared to be before he stepped down. Insightful social commentary might make the rounds on social media and drive traffic for websites, but it offers only a temporary catharsis that is replaced by the next day’s tragedy or political faux pas, or instills in us a false sense of progress, just for watching.

And yet, there’s Stewart, appearing on both The Daily Show and The Late Show, calling for Congress to renew the Zadroga Act. Likewise, there’s Oliver, regularly racking up many millions of views, streams, and shares for treatises on noncommercial topics such as prisoner reentry. If Stewart can be reenergized so quickly, larger audience interest can be, too — even if Stewart isn't on TV every night, and even if Colbert isn't playing "Colbert." If 2015 established late-night TV as a place for wider array of political conversations, then 2016, with the increased spotlight of the election, is sure give those operating after 11 pm more material to push those conversations even further.