Aug 1, 2016

Jon Stewart is producing a "Real Time" animated series for HBO.

Former "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart will return to television with an animated series, HBO announced this weekend. The series could air as early as September, but could debut later in the fall.

"The idea is that it will be an animated parody of cable news networks with portals like The Onion," HBO programming president Casey Bloys told the Television Critics Association on Saturday.

The show will air in the usual TV series format, but HBO plans to roll out short-form content through digital platforms; it is not yet clear whether the TV series will be a compilation of short-form content produced for other platforms or something else entirely. It is not yet clear whether the TV series will be a compilation of short content produced for other platforms or something completely different.

What is known is that the series will be produced at a very fast pace to take advantage of regular news cycles; HBO is developing an animation pipeline for Stewart that will allow him to "comment in real time on what's happening during the day's news. He can comment in real time on what's happening during the news of the day," Broyles said. "It's going to be a simple animation, but it's going to be ...... will allow us to react fairly quickly to what is happening in the news that day." [The animation pipeline for the series is being developed by Otoy, a high-profile animation technology startup that is a leader in cloud-based rendering and its application to virtual and augmented reality; HBO acquired a stake in Otoy last April. At the time, Jon Stewart said, "Otoy is incredible! It's a creative platform with endless mind-boggling possibilities. My dream is to one day understand how they did it!"