To the delight of dozens, Jon Stewart is returning to late-night TV. On January 24, the news broke that the liberal television icon would be coming home to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, the political comedy program where he originally made a name for himself in the early 2000s. The 61-year-old is reportedly set to serve as both an executive producer and a part-time host, scheduled for a once-a-week slot in the anchor’s chair, which he no doubt plans to use as a platform to convince his shrinking and aging audience of his own continued relevance.

Stewart is not a stupid man; a part of him must know that he is climbing aboard a sinking ship. But men who have grown accustomed to the limelight are rarely able to recognize when the time has come to ride off into the sunset; the past decade of Stewart’s career betrays an obsessive desire to be in front of a camera that is unusual even by the standards of his industry.

Even among left-leaning outlets, Stewart’s return was met with apprehension. As Rolling Stone noted, “The Daily Show cable audience has declined by 75 percent, from 2.2 million to 570,000 viewers a night, while its viewers’ median age, which was 48 in the mid-2010s, is now 63.” A Business Insider headline was more curt: “Holy crap, look how small and old ‘The Daily Show’s’ audience has gotten.” Time’s report on the topic, aptly titled “Jon Stewart’s Daily Show Return Is a Bad Omen for Late Night,” mused “that many who tune in will be Stewart loyalists doing so out of nostalgia…. Only a show—or a network, or an entertainment monolith, or a TV format—whose glory days were over would be so eager to revisit them.”