News broke Monday that Larry Wilmore, one of the former Daily Show correspondents anointed to usher in a new era for Comedy Central, was losing his show after less than two years on the air. Despite landing the coveted Colbert Report slot with a plum Daily Show lead-in, Wilmore was unable to connect with audiences, and his dismal ratings make the cancellation not all that surprising. Is it a sign of the continuing collapse of Comedy Central? Or a signal that a new era is about to dawn?

As the increasingly nervous HBO and AMC will tell you, it’s dangerous to hang your brand on just one or two hits. When first Stephen Colbert and then Jon Stewart left Comedy Central, its established brand of smart, politically relevant comedy started to wobble. The loss of Key and Peele and the impending end of Inside Amy Schumer and the critically beloved (if under-watched) Review (both are expected to last just one more season) leaves the network with mostly just Broad City continuing to deliver the sharp, high-profile comedy the network had become known for in the Stewart era.

Comedy Central is in a ratings free fall, with Trevor Noah’s Daily Show taking the biggest hit. (In May of this year, the Wrap calculated that Noah had lost 35 percent of Stewart’s audience. The numbers have dropped even lower since.) And it’s not just audiences fleeing Comedy Central: the network is losing the cache that comes with critical acclaim and awards prestige. After a spate of Peabody Awards for Colbert, Schumer, and Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, Comedy Central has been absent from the list the past two years. And for the first time since 2001, The Daily Show didn’t even earn an Emmy nomination in July.

Left, by Kevin Winter/Getty Images; right, by Brad Barket/Getty Images

It certainly doesn’t help that other platforms like Netflix, Seeso, and IFC are horning in on Comedy Central’s territory as an incubator of fresh comedic talent. And in what might be considered a couple of fatal errors, Comedy Central let Daily Show alums Samantha Bee and John Oliver slip through its fingers and head off to lend TBS and HBO some of that coveted Stewart-esque comedy cred.

So is that it? Without Colbert and Stewart and the rest, is Comedy Central destined to slowly decline into complete cultural irrelevancy? Maybe not. The network is certainly learning from its errors and is determined not to let another Bee or Oliver fly the coop. The two top remaining Daily Show correspondents, Jessica Williams and Jordan Klepper, have been handed lucrative deals to start their own Comedy Central shows. “Given the choice for people to use The Daily Show as a platform to go to other places or stay at Comedy Central, I prefer the latter,” the network’s then president of original programming, Kent Alterman, told Deadline last March.

Alterman has since been tapped to replace chief Michele Ganeless, who had been with the network since the 90s and served as Comedy Central’s president since 2007. Alterman’s era will kick off with a hugely ambitious development slate that includes (in addition to the new shows for Williams and Klepper), 15 new specials and 21 new scripted shows. The comedians involved in shaping Comedy Central’s future include some established talent like Kevin Hart, Jeff Ross, Will Ferrell, and Adam McKay, but Comedy Central is betting big on less familiar names like Moshe Kasher, Rachel Feinstein, and soon-to-be Ocean’s Eight star Awkwafina. There’s an obvious preference among the potential scripts for younger-skewing, boundary-pushing shows in the vein of Broad City, and Alterman is clearly hoping that one of these newer names will be the next Schumer, Key, or Peele.

In order to make way for all these new shows, Alterman will have to get rid of what’s not working. Starting, it seems, with Wilmore. Could the abysmally rated Daily Show be next? It would seem a drastic move to cut the network’s most recognizable brand name. But it’s clear that Alterman has his eye on the future—and the legacy of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show may be worth letting go if it means getting to move on.