From our fearless editor Ben Koo a few days ago:
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is quickly becoming like The Wire as those who watch believe it’s the best show on TV and those who have never seen it think you’re crazy and will probably never check it out.”
Last summer, Jon Stewart took two months off from The Daily Show to give way to a known quantity that wasn’t considered a comedy giant. Even with his track record as a top correspondent, John Oliiver getting the bump to the big chair was seen as something temporary and not at all any type of threat to Stewart’s job security.
A year later, John Oliver is the most important person on television.
The story is well known by this point. Oliver killed as guest host of the show, and even with Stewart’s return, it was general knowledge that Oliver’s time as second English banana was coming to a close. Sensing Oliver’s star rising, HBO reached out about a weekly show similar to what he did with The Daily Show at the end of 2013, and with a big checkbook in hand, Oliver took a new gig.
However, the biggest wild card was actually Stephen Colbert, who was offered David Letterman’s spot upon his retirement. But that was only after HBO offered Oliver his show, taking away a natural spot for Oliver to take over with Comedy Central. It was seen at the time as a coup for HBO, but there was still a little skepticism about how Oliver’s show would match up against Stewart and Colbert, especially with it only occurring once a week.
Instead, Last Week Tonight has become yet another jewel in HBO’s crown.
While Stewart’s undeniably been the king of late-night political satire, Oliver decided to put his own unique twist on a similar format. With no commercials and the free reign of the English language at his disposal, Oliver decided to turn his show into his own version of 60 Minutes, going longform on all the pertinent issues from the previous week in only half the time.
Stewart’s sass and playful demeanor mixed with moments of gravitas has become his calling card, but Oliver’s brand of humor lends itself to digging deeper into the issue itself and exposing it, leading to red herrings and non sequiturs that lighten the mood only before Oliver decides to dive right back into it. A lot of this has to do with Oliver having complete creative control, and thanks to HBO having a revenue model that is free of ads, Oliver is free to criticize whoever he wants.
As some like Bill Maher have used that same platform as a way to prop himself up as the ultimate talking head, Oliver decided to use it as a way to tell as complete a story as possible on the biggest stories the news has to offer, often with incredible results.
After a month where it looked like Oliver was still figuring things out, he struck gold on June 1, bringing up Net Neutrality in a way that not only allowed the viewer at home to make sense of the issue, but doing it in an inimitable fashion that Oliver would soon make his trademark:
From there on, it was like a snowball rolling down the hill, not being able to be stopped. He next tackled FIFA’s unbelievable indiscretions in anticipation of the World Cup:
Oliver then dedicated nearly the entirety of his June 15 show to the fight for LGBT rights in Uganda, which exposed an unbelievable trail of events dating back to the arrival of American missionary Scott Lively that led to the creation of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009. He interviewed Pepe Julian Onziema that evening, a transgendered man who has fought for gay rights in his homeland for over a decade.
Within three weeks, Oliver cemented his status as someone who could touch current events through comedy, investigative journalism and a style all his own, featuring a rapier wit and an eye for the absurd. While the format and structure of his program look like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, the foundation of his shows built upon his time with his former Comedy Central compatriots has given way to a half-hour that has separated itself from the pack. Even with Stewart still being Stewart and Colbert poised to be the future late night king, Oliver looks like the man worth watching when it comes to satirical news.
And it looks like people are starting to catch on to exactly that. After 1.11 million viewers tuned in to the series premiere on April 27, the number of viewers went down over the course of the next two months before picking back up again near the end of July, right after the three-week stretch mentioned above. Last Week Tonight has averaged nearly one million viewers per week since its arrival on HBO, but it’s made a killing online, nabbing nearly 750,000 YouTube subscribers and having over 85 million total video views, including a lot of YouTube-exclusive content. The FIFA segment has nearly eight million views alone, with the Net Neutrality segment closing in on six million.
That looks to be a key component of what keeps Oliver relevant: Since HBO subscribers have already given the network sufficient revenue and Oliver’s show isn’t a detriment to the network’s production budget, any online backing will keep Oliver at the front of people’s minds. It’s a platform that Comedy Central is only recently realizing with its app, and the argument can be made that Oliver is making the most of his creative freedom by utilizing YouTube as a tool that drives people to his show on HBO. In the execs’ eyes, it’s basically free advertisement.
It’s been just over a year since Oliver’s final appearance as the host of The Daily Show. While HBO is known for having some of the best original programming on TV, it looks like Oliver’s presence could turn the content provider into something worth watching on a weekly basis as opposed to waiting for your favorite show to come on for its next season. If that’s the case, Oliver could do something that Maher couldn’t really do for HBO: Make the network a go-to place for current events.
