John Oliver Keeps Pushing the Rock Up the Hill
As ‘Last Week Tonight’ launches its 13th season into an atmosphere of division and anti-information, its host explains how the show has changed—and why they keep making itJohn Oliver Keeps Pushing the Rock Up the Hill
As ‘Last Week Tonight’ launches its 13th season into an atmosphere of division and anti-information, its host explains how the show has changed—and why they keep making it
Of all the things in John Oliver’s office—the Liverpool FC jerseys, the framed Rolling Stone covers, the tiny top hats his friend Jimmy Kimmel sent him to put on his Emmys—none is as important as the foam poster board resting by the door. It’s a numbered list of all the topics he’s covered on Last Week Tonight.
When Oliver’s at his desk, the neatly organized guide is right in his eyeline. And while we’re talking about the evolution of his HBO show on a frigid New York City day in January, he points at it a lot. “Number seven, immigration, that was a big lesson for us because it felt pretty unsatisfying by the end,” he says. “And we realized that what we’d really been doing was kind of just a slightly long Daily Show segment. And we were just regurgitating clips that had been getting passed around. From that, I think we realized we wanted to show people things that they hadn’t seen before.”
Then Oliver gestures at another line on the board. “Our 11th show was about prisons and it was like 16 minutes long, ended with puppets, but was pretty reductive, right?” he adds. “You can’t talk about prisons for 16 minutes. That’s absurd. You can only skim the surface.”
Back then, he says several times during our conversation, “We didn’t know what we were doing.” But eventually his show found its groove and expanded its scope. What started as a half-hour program stretched to 40 minutes or more. He points to last year’s episode on the hell that is child incarceration in America. It was almost an hour long. “I knew it was going to be a tough sell to the audience,” Oliver says. “No one wants to hear about that. It feels like misbehaving children are things that people have the least capacity for sympathy for.”
Yet he tackled the issue anyway, because he believes in two things that have become tenets of his show: (1) viewers should know about the machinations of cruel or broken or exploitative systems, and (2) they can handle learning about them.
“As we improved as a show, it felt like, ‘Oh, I think we can just about hold people’s attention for something this dark,’” Oliver says.
It’s a good thing, then. Because these days the world feels like a much bleaker place than it was when the series launched in 2014. Which is why it’s had to evolve. Every week, Oliver is forced to make sense of the darkness closing in. He does that the best way he knows how: by being the most helpful, profane explainer he can be. “I guess all you can really hope to do is present people with good information with as much context as possible around it, in as persuasive a way as possible,” he says. “And then see if you can move them.”
There is, unsurprisingly, some resignation in his voice. With the 13th season of Last Week Tonight set to premiere on Sunday, the host knows that the collective appetite for thoughtful, well-researched political humor has shrunk to almost nothing. In a frighteningly anti-intellectual, short-form-video-obsessed country run by a presidential administration with a habit of threatening late-night comedians, Oliver’s style is a relic. But 350 episodes later, he hopes there’s still room for a show like his. And not just for the audience’s sake. “Working on those stories kind of gets you through to that point where you start processing it into comedy,” he says. “Which at least gives you a little bit of a gulp of air as you’re drowning.”
More on the Age of Misinformation
The thing is, the flood of bad news is sometimes so overwhelming that it makes catharsis damn near impossible. “Every story that we look at—not every—but most stories are worse than you thought they would be going in,” the 48-year-old Oliver says.
We spoke just days after masked United States Customs and Border Protection agents shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Watching Donald Trump, White House officials, and the right-wing ecosystem deny what video evidence quickly revealed to be a brutal execution made Oliver feel like he was losing his mind. “If the technique they’re going to use—and it seems like this is the way they’ve been operating—is to take something which seems clear on camera and through brute force deny that you’ve seen what you’ve seen, it feels like that requires a response,” he says. “And that response includes filling the streets of a freezing Minnesota to insist that you saw exactly what you saw.”
Last Week Tonight was on its annual break in December and January, so it couldn’t address the killings of Pretti or Renee Nicole Good right away. But after a two-week holiday vacation, Oliver and his staff immediately went to work on stories about the shootings. “Sometimes it’s about the thing that’s happening right in front of you,” says executive producer Tim Carvell. “Increasingly these days it feels like there’s no way to talk about something other than ICE raids in Minneapolis.” But sometimes, he adds, “the thing that we really do enjoy is finding great reporting on a topic that has been less covered and wanting to say to people, ‘Hey, did you know this?’”
On Last Week Tonight, there’s space for stories about the Minneapolis protests and stories about the insidiousness of “pig butchering” scams. The mix of reactive and in-depth segments requires two things that are currently at a premium in the entertainment industry: time and manpower. When LWT debuted, it took a week to make an episode. Now it takes six. The show started with a single research producer. Today there are six research producers and six research associate producers. Not to mention six footage producers and 11 writers, including Oliver himself, Carvell, and fellow executive producer Liz Stanton. Each of Oliver’s first-person essays is a giant puzzle; assembling one is an intricate process that’s taken over a decade to fully refine.
If the technique they’re going to use is to take something which seems clear on camera and through brute force deny that you’ve seen what you’ve seen, it feels like that requires a response.John Oliver
Looking back on it, Oliver believes that the eureka moment came after an early-season episode about the North Dakota oil boom. It was, Carvell remembers, just too dry. “Like being on Chopped and trying to make a meal out of just a sleeve of Saltines,” he says. “Look, you can put a lot of stuff around them, but it’s just a meal of Saltines.”
Oliver called it “a real slog.” They were trying to do too much. “By the time you explain the fourth complicated thing,” he says, “people might lose the thread.” And all the clips that aired with the piece were purely miserable. That led the show’s staff to realize that they had to become better video curators. “We started putting red stars on cards of clips that were entertaining or interesting or inherently funny and then blue stars on things that were sad,” Oliver says. “And you realize that you can’t have no red stars. You can’t have too many blues, or what exactly do you think you’re doing? And what are you asking the writers to write jokes after? If it’s the fourth clip of someone crying, what are they supposed to do? It’s just too much force-feeding people vegetables.”
Last Week Tonight is, after all, still trying to make people laugh through the pain. That’s been Oliver’s main goal since he left The Daily Show in 2013, after seven and a half years as a correspondent and fill-in host. From the beginning, he knew he needed to differentiate himself from Jon Stewart. His former boss told him as much. “He was very clear in saying, ‘You don’t want to just do this. Do something else with the skills that you’ve learned here,’” Oliver says. “Which I think we were going to do anyway, but it was very nice to have it out of his face.”
If Stewart was, as he once put it, the kid who sat “in the back of the country” throwing spitballs, Oliver was the one who sat in front and mimicked the teacher. He was at his best when he had the class’s undivided attention. “The beauty of having a captive audience, literally, in the studio, but at home, too, is not having to break down for a commercial,” Oliver says. “It means you can try and give them as much context around a story as possible.”
When Last Week Tonight premiered on April 27, 2014, critics praised Oliver for taking what was then a novel approach. Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter even prophetically suggested that the host needed to “rethink this half-hour idea” because he “wanted to laugh longer at some bits or even ponder a couple of others for maybe three seconds more than I was allowed.”
In Time, James Poniewozik called it a “funny, confident start. I, like I’m guessing a few of you, DVR The Daily Show, watching it sooner when there’s a story I can’t wait to hear Stewart’s take on, later when there’s not. For now, I’ll gladly add Last Week Tonight to that pile and watch to see if it becomes essential.”
What no one knew at the time was that the show wouldn’t have to rely on the audience recording it on TV—or even subscribing to HBO. Around that time, Carvell remembers having a meeting with the network’s digital team about posting segments of the show on the internet. When he was the head writer at The Daily Show, Comedy Central built it a website. “We had asked them to build what The Daily Show had, because we were like, ‘That’s how things work. That’s what people do. They go to your show’s website, and they watch your clips on the show’s website,’” he says. “And they were like, ‘You can just put them on YouTube.’”
Carvell and Oliver were sure that was a bad decision. They were wrong. On cable, most of the first-season episodes drew between half a million and a million viewers, but the chunks of the show that HBO posted on YouTube quickly began piling up millions upon millions of views. “That was a tremendous surprise for us, realizing, ‘Oh, that’s actually a better place for our show to live than on a dedicated website that’s siloed off on a corner of the internet,’” Carvell says. “And one nice thing about that decision that HBO’s digital team made for us is that all of our shows are still up on YouTube … nothing we did at The Daily Show is on the internet anymore.”
If there was any question of whether a show hosted by a British guy talking at Americans uninterrupted for a half hour or more could find a big audience, the virality of those early clips answered it. In an era when digital media actually had a pulse, blogs across the land juiced their traffic by embedding the latest hot Last Week Tonight video. In fact, for a while The Awl ran “The John Oliver Video Sweepstakes,” a cheeky weekly feature that tracked which sites got the biggest Oliver bump.
All of that gave Oliver a chance to do what he did best: educating white-collar workers on their lunch breaks and commutes about complex issues they might not have known or cared about.
This time [in Trump's second administration], it’s so much darker that it feels like the best thing that we can do is provide more context for the daily, weekly horrors.Oliver
Though Carvell says that they “don’t generally go into a story with the thought that we are going to effect change,” several LWT segments have helped lead to legislative action. Needle-moving breakdowns of things like chicken-farming practices, civil forfeiture, FIFA corruption, and bail requirements even moved former Ringer writer Victor Luckerson to coin the phrase “The John Oliver Effect.”
No topic was too inscrutable for the host. It was Oliver who inarguably first raised mass awareness about media conglomerates lobbying to dismantle net neutrality, a set of rules essentially preventing them from favoring certain websites or apps that pay for faster internet speeds—and throttling those that don’t. “The cable companies have figured out the great truth of America: If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring,” Oliver said in the June 2014 report. By then he had begun to figure out the great truth of his show: If you want to teach people about something boring, put it inside something funny. At the end of the segment, he issued a challenge to his audience: “Focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction. Seize your moment, my lovely trolls!”
Over the next few days, over 45,000 online comments about net neutrality proposals poured into the Federal Communications Commission and crashed its website. It was the start of something. The following February, the FCC approved net neutrality rules. “No one, whether government or corporate,” chairman Tom Wheeler said at the time, “should control free open access to the internet.”
Alas, the net neutrality tale doesn’t have a happy ending. In 2017, months after Last Week Tonight dedicated another episode to the subject, the majority-Republican FCC repealed the rules. “There was no problem to solve,” chairman Ajit Pai said. “The Internet wasn’t broken in 2015, we were not living in some digital dystopia.” The Joe Biden administration restored net neutrality in 2024, but last year a federal appeals court struck it down again.
Therein lies the peril of a civic-minded comedy show. Presenting insightful information can do only so much in a country that has seemingly become hell-bent on rejecting it. “This is the stupidest day in American history,” Matt Christman, a cohost of Chapo Trap House, wrote on the day of Trump’s first inauguration, “a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.”
When Trump was gaining steam as a presidential candidate, Oliver, like most comedians, had a ball pointing out the ridiculousness of his rise. A decade ago, though, there was more of an appetite for jokes about Trump that were, well, silly. The LWT segment that crescendos with Oliver imploring America to invoke Trump’s ancestral name and “Make Donald Drumpf Again” piled up a combined 85 million views on YouTube and Facebook in its first month. But the bit, which the least funny people in your life quoted ad nauseam, became a symbol of liberals failing to take Trump seriously. Oliver himself has even admitted the joke got old fast. “There’s a reason we didn’t use it again,” he said a year later in a Rolling Stone interview. “It’s the song I skip past. It’s ‘Creep.’ It’s a good song, Thom Yorke! It was a good song when he wrote it.”
“It was a different world into which we were injecting a slightly different show,” Oliver says now. “So yeah, I would absolutely wince at some of those older stories.”
To Oliver, boomeranging back to Trump after a four-year break has made his chaotic first term feel less absurd than it actually was. “In that first administration, you would have something inherently ludicrous and you would have to explain why that was actually a problem,” he says. “This time, it’s so much darker that it feels like the best thing that we can do is provide more context for the daily, weekly horrors. To understand when something is an aberration and when something is just an accelerant to a preexisting problem.”
While it’s awfully tempting for us to believe that Trump is the former, he’s always been the latter. Oliver knows the president is not unique. “I think there’s always been this tendency in America—and in every country—to conveniently forget about your weakest moments in the past,” he says. “It’s what was [one] of the many things that frustrated me about Joe Biden—the whole, like, ‘This is not who we are, this is not who America is’ is a maddening statement in general because it’s such a willful ignoring of who you have been.”
That doesn’t mean that Oliver hasn’t had surreal moments that felt unprecedented. He was a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last September, when the host’s innocuous comment about Charlie Kirk’s murder stirred up a right-wing shitstorm. After FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC and station owners Nexstar and Sinclair claimed that they’d stop airing the show, the network suspended Kimmel. “It was horrifying to watch unfold because of what it potentially meant,” says Oliver, who vigorously defended his peer on his own show. “If ABC had acquiesced fully and canned the show, I think we’d be in a very, very dark place.”
Kimmel was back on the air a week later. But ABC’s willingness to give in to the Trump administration, however briefly, still sticks in Oliver’s craw. “What was so frustrating about that was watching companies singularly fail to learn the lesson that you cannot pacify them,” he says. “They’re just going to come back and want some more. It is that classic bully rule. You’re going to have to stand up to them at some point.”
The incident, Oliver admits, made him feel “massively lucky” that he hasn’t had to deal with any network interference. In a time when the federal government has gutted public broadcasting and openly pushed for favorable media consolidation, he knows that it’s a luxury to be allowed to say what he wants on the air—even, say, about his bosses. “Biting the hand that feeds you is a lovely way to nourish yourself,” he jokes. “It’s still technically meat, isn’t it? There’s a lot of protein in that hand.”
Oliver used to genuinely appreciate hearing David Letterman tweaking CBS on The Late Show. “I’d think, ‘Oh, OK, that makes me like CBS a little bit more, to be honest,’” he says. “Not that much, but more. And I hope that HBO gets the same kind of credit.”
What was so frustrating about [the Jimmy Kimmel situation] was watching companies singularly fail to learn the lesson that you cannot pacify them. They’re just going to come back and want some more.Oliver
Inevitably, the pending sale of HBO’s parent company, Warner Bros., to Netflix will come up this season on Last Week Tonight. “The fact that we’ve been able to talk shit through two mergers and we’re going to talk shit through this next one, I think that’s a sign of health in a way,” Oliver says. “My job definitely won’t change.”
For now, Oliver and his perennially Emmy Award–winning crew are just eager to continue to fill out the foam poster board in his office with stories they feel that the public should know about. Watching the news for a living these days can be miserable, but the show gives them a place to channel their despair. “I don’t know what you do when you don’t have a place to put this,” Carvell says. “That was a revelation for us of like, ‘Oh, it’s not the worst thing to have to think about this in a way that lets you work with others to figure out how to deal with it.’”
When I ask Oliver what, if anything, gives him faith in humanity in 2026, he doesn’t have to think very hard about his answer. “Watching the breadth and the ferocity of the pushback in Minnesota is something,” he says. “There’s one clip that Tim and I got really interested in. It’s relatively undramatic, but it’s ICE pulling up outside of some store, and within 45 seconds, you just see people coming out of cars, coming out of apartments, out of shops, and all of a sudden surrounding [the agents], and then they go away. And it was the scale and speed of the pushback that, one, made you think this community has fully had it, and two, this community is acting as one unit to push back hard in a way that I think is going to work.”
It’s the pushback that helps preserve whatever optimism Oliver has left. “What we tend to find is that as we’re doing these incredibly dark stories, that in researching them we’re often talking to experts and people who are working on solutions,” he says. “And when you see the truly tireless efforts of activists to make things incrementally better, that really does give you faith that people aren’t going to stop trying.”
John Oliver would surely understand if you think he’s whistling past the graveyard. But he’d prefer a different metaphor. “However Sisyphean it feels, you’ve got to try,” he says. “You’ve got to push that rock, man. Maybe it’ll balance on top.”
