Jon Stewart and HBO scrap planned animated show

The project was initially supposed to start before the US election result was announced

Jon Stewart attends a 2015 Farm Sanctuary gala in New York City Getty Images/Brent N. Clark

Despite Jon Stewart still making headlines post-late night career — mainly thanks to semi-regular appearances on Stephen Colbert’s show — HBO has scrapped his much-anticipated animated show.

“HBO and Jon Stewart have decided not to proceed with a short form digital animated project,” a joint statement issues to The New York Times reads.

“We all thought the project had great potential, but there were technical issues in terms of production and distribution that proved too difficult given the quick turnaround and topical nature of the material. We’re excited to report that we have some future projects together which you will be hearing about in the near future.”

Stewart was originally going to produce digital shorts for HBO that would appear on the network’s digital apps. The project — which would have been primarily made up of Onion-style satirical takedowns of news broadcasters — was expected to launch before the general election

Unlike typical animated programmes, the cartoons were set to use modern technology to ‘live draw' the segments, allowing Stewart “to comment on events in real time” — similar technology has been used by Colbert when interviewing cartoon versions of Hilary Clinton and Trump live on his show.

According to the NYT, the animators behind the show managed to shorten the turn-around time to produce each show but churning out high-level creative content daily proved challenging.

HBO reportedly invested hefty sums into the project and now owns the technology created during the development phase, which they are looking to implement somehow in the future.

Stewart has already inked a four-year deal with HBO that started in November 2015, three months after Comedy Central’s The Daily Show ended.