For John Oliver, recent news that Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery would press pause on their $110 billion merger has HBO’s troublemaking golden boy feeling … much like he did before. “Nothing’s happening, and everything has stayed the same,” says Oliver, during a phone call early Friday morning. “That’s the only way that we can really move forward, total denial.”
The host of Last Week Tonight says he long ago learned to keep his head down when, as he puts it, “prospective business daddies” weigh the future of his employer. So, as his current contract is due to expire at year’s end, late-night’s reigning Emmy magnet is staying the course. He just picked up the option to extend his contract by another year, keeping him at his hit show through 2027.
This is good news not only for Oliver’s devoted viewers, over 2 million of them streaming his weekly deep dives on YouTube alone, but also for his platform. Last Week Tonight has delivered 76 Emmy nominations and 32 wins to HBO since it launched in 2014. On the occasion of his latest three nominations and his extension, Oliver spoke about his wild run, his latest corporate target (litigious Texas convenience store chain Buc-ees), keeping the late-night host group chat alive after Stephen Colbert‘s cancellation and the irony of U.S. Secretary of Health RFK Jr. launching a cooking show as lettuce sends thousands of Americans to the hospital and the toilet.
You and your staff have already won 32 Emmys for Last Week Tonight and you’re nominated for another three this year. That’s about at the point where Oprah Winfrey stopped submitting herself for awards. Do you think HBO would go for that if you ever wanted to pull a similar move?
If the bar is Oprah, let’s all agree I’m a long way under that fucking bar. The next person who pulls the Oprah move had better be Gayle King. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pull the Oprah move. Emmys have been very important to HBO, to the extent that they have built us some level of golden armor over the years. I’m massively grateful that it’s meant that we can continue to operate the way we’ve been operating. It’d probably be dangerous to say, “We don’t need this.” And then, like in The Odyssey, be impaled in the chest. Oh, it turns out we did need the armor!
I think it’s fair to say you have more on your side that just the awards.
You always want to be exactly as much trouble as you are worth. So the more you are worth to them, the more trouble you can cause.
Speaking of trouble, have you heard from Buc-ees yet?
Case in point! We didn’t hear from Buc-ees at all. When we reached out to them last week, they aggressively told us that they would not be engaging in any questions — including things as simple as “How many flavors of fudge do you actually sell?” I hear that they are going to let this go. So, we’ll see.
It would be a very, very bad look not to.
It would be a bad look for Buc-ees. I was mostly confident that they would not do it, but some companies do feel drawn to a bad look, like a moth to flame.
On the scale of poking the bear, mocking Buc-ees in defense of other regional convenience store chains is low risk. What’s the most recent segment that had you a little less confident?
You’re right. When you’re managing the level of consequence, you think, “I think we’re going to be OK even if this goes badly.” When we talk about large litigious companies, there is a kind of healthy low level anxiety that we operate through. We are very careful to make sure that when we’re taking a risk, it’s worth taking. The moments of tension that we have with our lawyers are always a slight difference of opinion over what their jobs are. They think their job is to stop us getting sued. We think their job is to make sure that when we are sued, we win. Rarely does it happen that we’re sued, but we do win the lawsuits — which is not to say that that doesn’t come with real cost. You want to make sure that is it worth that cost to make a point.
I enjoyed what I saw of your stint on General Hospital. Was the experience all that you wanted it to be?
Yes, it absolutely was. It was truly fun. We’re so control freakish about our show. So whenever we have a joke that leaves our show and someone picks it up and executes it, when a joke goes into the wild and takes on a life of its own, it feels so good. Last year, we rebranded a minor league baseball team. This year, they are still doing it on their own. They own all of it. It’s their joke. I felt the same way about soap operas. They were definitely taking a risk by having us involved in this, and their schedules are so tight.
Most people would be shocked at how little room for error there is on a soap opera schedule. And you’re also appearing on Days of Our Lives next, right?
I heard they move fast. I had not understood just how quickly they move. So I was very, very concerned not to be the thing that held them up that day. There’s a whole lot of one-take wonders going on on those sets. It’s truly incredible. So it was very generous of them to take the risk of putting an unproven element, to put it mildly, into that well-oiled machine.
You just took the option to extend your contract with HBO for another year, taking you through 2027, which feels like a very convenient amount of time for a man in your position.
Yeah. (Laughs.)
The last time we spoke, a little over two years ago, you joked about already having had so many different parent companies at HBO. And here we are again.
We have various prospective business daddies circling, no one fully willing to commit just yet.
What is your reaction to this latest delay?
Who knows? I have absolutely no idea, which is almost helpful to the fact that I do not have any ability to control anything that happens with this merger. Therefore, we’ll just do what we’ve done — which is continue like it isn’t happening. Nothing’s happening and everything has stayed the same. That’s the only way that we can really move forward. Total denial.
But there are other business grownups in your general orbit. Have they talked at all about what this actually means and how it might impact the timing of any changes?
Business grownups, however well-intentioned they are, don’t know what it’s actually going to mean. In general, business grownups will say one thing before a merger happens and their behavior can be very different afterwards. Again, I only know this so deeply because we’ve seen it happen a few times with this company. The rhetoric before a merger and the behavior after, that doesn’t always match up. But there’s nothing you can do, other than to make it clear that you’re not going to be amenable to changes. I think we’ve made that pretty clear over the year. It’s just not worth it.
Have you spoken to Stephen Colbert much since his forced transition?
I saw him after his last show, after he managed to get that entire building through that experience — which was an amazing thing to watch. I haven’t physically seen him, but our group chat is still active.
One silver lining to Colbert losing his job is that, over the last year, I think audiences got a sense that there’s a real camaraderie between all of you. And that was hardly the case a few decades ago.
It’s probably helpful that the stakes of the late night wars have become so low. It’s crazy to act like it’s the Cold War. Also, we have so much in common in terms of the peculiarities of the job. I’ve known Seth [Meyers] since I moved to America. It’s been really fun to have this outlet of each other and to give each other a place to vent sometimes and just to know that you can make fun of a situation — either what Colbert went through, but also [Jimmy] Kimmel. We’re coming up on the year anniversary of that absolute mayhem he went through, which was just such a deep outrage. It was very nice to be able to talk privately and publicly about what he was going through.
I think about how you and your marketing team have tried to capture the national mood in your promo art over the years — applying tape to a buckling dam, hiding behind your desk, watching the globe burn. Do you think about running out of ways to visually express how bad things are?
I don’t know where rock bottom is, but my feet aren’t hitting the ground yet. It may have started with my head on the desk. And that was when things were great.
That was what, 2018?
The good old days! (Laughs.) For me, in those images, you want to project the idea that, as a show, we’re going to be fiddling while Rome burns. That’s why we are drawn to do some of the dumber stuff when things get to their darkest. Just over the last year, making a Ghanaian movie poster, getting cast on a soap opera, getting into a war with Buc-ees … we have some other really dumb things coming up. We found that during the pandemic — tracking down rat erotica — that when things are at their darkest, sometimes we’ll do the dumbest thing you can possibly imagine. So as well as staring into the void, you’re also shoveling ice cream into your mouth.
Do you have any plans to watch RFK Jr.’s cooking show?
Professionally, I’m guessing it’s going to be unavoidable. It’s a bold time to be launching it, when some of the ingredients are sending people to the hospital. This whole “Eat Real Foods” campaign, you’ve got a picture of that pyramid, and I’m seeing two things that I’m being warned not to eat on there. Otherwise, the results have “explosive” written around them.
As a longtime consumer of news media, when did it become the norm to just refer to diarrhea as “explosive?” This feels new.
Explosive! I heard CBS Sunday Morning, the slowest-paced television show currently on air, say “explosive diarrhea.” Come on! Jesus Christ! I don’t come to CBS Sunday Morning for this. I want to sit down with a country musician who I have a tacit awareness of. I want to be in their lovely Architectural Digest-looking home. Where do they get their song ideas?
It’s the last day of July, so it does feel appropriate to ask for your review of how Trump chose to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary.
You mean his one-man Bonnaroo? I would say that the way he chose to celebrate it was on brand. And you can either take that as a compliment or as the insult that it was intended as.
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