New Comedy Central president Kent Alterman, who earlier this month took over for departing network head Michele Ganeless, inherits a network that has struggled of late from a ratings perspective but is being looked upon by Viacom CEO Philipe Duaman to help spur the company’s financial fortunes.

Alterman recently spoke to Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead to discuss the network’s brand, its appeal to millennials and the struggles of its late-night franchises The Daily Show With Trevor Noah and The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.

Related:MCN Original Video: Kent Alterman discusses the evolution of "The Daily Show" under Trevor Noah

MCN: How would you define the Comedy Central brand?

Kent Alterman: I’ll start by how our audience defines it, which is that it’s the No. 1 brand in comedy across all platforms. For me, what unifies all of our talent and content that we put out there is that they bring a very distinct point of view and voice to what they do that generally shares some degree of relevance, intelligence and an ability to reflect the world back at our audience in a way that gives them a break from the world.

MCN: You’re coming in at a time when the network’s ratings have been declining for some time. How do you view the network’s ratings performances and what can be done to curtail viewership declines?

KA: The entire industry is facing the same challenges, especially in reaching our young millennial audience. Viewing behaviors are changing, so we’re pursuing dual tracks.

We’re tending to the linear ratings – our audience consumes original content, and reruns don’t mean so much anymore, so we’re looking at ways to have more and better content.

We’re also making sure that we not only make our content available on all platforms, but also that we’re creating original content that is conceived and executed with these different platforms in mind so that it feels more organic. We were the only entertainment channel to be part of Snapchat Discover and we’ve been doubling down on how much original content we’ve been creating for that platform. It also affords us a development pipeline in the sense of making more bets with emerging talent and having more ways to working with talent in general on different platforms so that we can open up the aperture of our talent development.

MCN: Having said that, what would you consider to be the network’s core shows?

KA: The good news for us is that we’ve been having this great run of shows like South Park, Tosh 2.0 and The Daily Show, which has been an institution. We don’t have Jon [Stewart] but we’re bullish on Trevor. The Daily Show under Trevor Noah is the No. 1 late night show with male millennials and second overall after [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy] Fallon. It’s been experiencing several months of repeated growth, so all the signs are pointing the right way, and creatively Trevor is taking the ball and running with it – we’re really pleased with his evolution.

There are other shows that are incredibly popular including Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, Drunk History, Another Period,Nikki Glazer and so on. Ultimately what we feel gratified by is that in the last several years we’ve had a great run in introducing new talent, and they are all resonating with our audience.

MCN: You mentioned The Daily Show, and obviously a lot has been written about the show’s declining ratings as well as those of The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore since Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert left the respective shows. From your perspective, how have those shows performed with their new hosts and what if anything can be done to get ratings for the shows back to prior levels?

KA:  I think you have to look at a few things. It’s not like we replaced those shows at a time when there was stability in the marketplace of our business. It coincided with a period of incredible disruption in our business, and so its almost an unfair comparison; its not apples to apples. Even if you look at our late shows now and you include all the platforms where people are watching complete episodes – whether its on our website or our app or Hulu – the numbers are really significant, so it’s a tough comparison. What we care about the most is our fans and how [the shows] are resonating with our fans, and we try to keep our eye on that ball.

MCN: What are the biggest challenges the network is facing today?

KA: We’re living in a very tumultuous, disruptive time in our industry, and so I think we’re all facing the same challenges. No one knows how it's all going to settle out, and for the most part we try to keep our eye on what’s most important, which is our talent and our content. No matter what changes come in our industry, the thing that will never change is the importance of having content that resonates for our audience.

MCN: You mentioned programming for multiple platforms. How much does the digital platform influence the content development and distribution decisions you have to make?

KA: We’re trying to be very holistic about development and not so much separate linear with multiplatform distribution, but just continue to serve all masters simultaneously. We don’t just produce our content and then chop it up and distribute it on other platforms. We’re really expanding our aperture to work with different people and develop content that is targeted to different platforms because, ultimately, we are led more than anything else by our audience, and our audience is consuming content in different ways on different platforms, so we want to be able to meet them where they are.

Comedy Central has renewed several of its current series, including Tosh.O and Drunk History, the network said Tuesday.

Tosh.O, executive produced by Daniel Tosh, Charlie Siskel and Christie Smith, will return for ninth season later this year, according to network officials, while Drunk History has been renewed for a fourth season, said network officials.

Other shows to receive a greenlight for a new season or new episodes include Not Safe With Nikki Glaser, Review, This Is Not Happening, Alternatino, Nothin’s Easy and Questionable Science.

The renewals and extension join previously announced renewals: for Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, South Park, and Workaholics.

PASADENA, Calif. — Comedy Central has picked up additional seasons of Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City, the network said Wednesday at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour.

Inside Amy Schumer was renewed for season five, while Broad City was given a fourth and fifth season.

Season four of Inside Amy Schumer will premiere in April.

Broad City returns to the network for its third season Feb. 17.

Every month, the analysts at TruthCo choose the most culturally relevant TV show. By “culturally relevant,” we mean the most keenly attuned to and in dialogue with the year’s cultural shifts in terms of content and marketing. From the role of feminism and race in pop culture to the reality of reality TV, these five shows from 2015 touched upon the most relevant social topics in culture today, keeping audiences entertained.

UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT

Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt rewrites the narrative that culture constructs around women who endure sexual abuse. Kimmy’s refusal to settle into the role of the traumatized victim, and her insistence on instead starting her life anew, reflects emergent survivor culture. This shift aligns with the strain of feminism taking hold in pop culture, which emphasizes personal narratives of female empowerment and refusal of defeat at the hands of the patriarchy.

INSIDE AMY SCHUMER

This latest season of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer bears witness to a new confidence as the show’s subversive ideas about gender — previously packaged in Schumer’s claim-to-fame insecure, self-loathing and promiscuous persona — are now being directed outward, fearlessly implicating society and the way it fails women, instead of how women are failing themselves. Better described as “full-frontal feminism,” it takes on a highly confrontational approach to its commentary. But this is not women-only comedy: Schumer makes great use of her male guest stars and represents an increasingly relevant cultural conversation that simultaneously implicates and includes men, who are both in on and the butt of the joke.

UnREAL

Reality TV viewers are curious about the manipulation and staging of reality TV. Lifetime’s UnREAL, a deconstruction of the competition dating genre, aligns with this cultural interest by pulling back the curtain and revealing just how much of a role production plays in creating what viewers perceive as “reality.” UnREAL also delivers this in spades, not only though the behavior of the contestants but more notably through the behavior of the producers, who have their own catfights, love triangles and emotional breakdowns. This meta-series occupies a space that allows it to simultaneously provide a new approach to a calcified (due to its own slump) and well-established genre as well as satisfy die-hard reality lovers. It’s a wink that appeals to almost everyone.

CHEF’S TABLE

Netflix’s Chef’s Table, which uses food as a vehicle to explore the “microjourney” of each chef, is representative of an emergent cultural shift that finds us more interested in craft and process than in result and finished product. Chef’s Table offers a meditation on creativity, portraying chefs as artistic visionaries and auteurs that have more in common with poets and dreamers than the harsh, hierarchical judges who have populated food TV for over a decade. As culture pays more attention to food as an expression of social values, the role of chef has been elevated to that of sophisticated thought leader, a shift echoed by Chef Table’s symphonic score and gorgeous cinematography.

MASTER OF NONE

On this Netflix series, Aziz Ansari (Dev) represents an emergent comedic and cultural point of view as he increasingly takes on the role of a public intellectual who is wrestling with big social questions, not just everyday minutiae. Equally important is the show’s perspective on race, which values inclusive, realistic representations over tokenism. For Dev, frustrated in his attempts to find satisfying work as an actor, it’s not enough that Indian characters are finally being played by Indian actors. The show takes its own advice: Dev wants to play roles that reflect his real experience, and Aziz creates them. These aren’t characters burdened with encapsulating Indian identity as a whole but instead are distinctive, multidimensional, even idiosyncratic, much like the actors who play them.

Emily Morris is director of cultural insights at TruthCo, a New York-based omnicultural branding and insights company.