‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’ renewed for two more seasons

HBO really wants you to know today that they want to have John Oliver in for the long haul.

Today, the network confirmed that they have picked up his late-night show “Last Week Tonight” for two more full seasons. In total, this means that Oliver is going to be a fixture on the network until at least the end of 2017, and that is a heck of a great run. These seasons will each be for 35 episodes, which means that you will have 17 Sundays where you will have to find something else interesting to do with your time. Sad face on that, but that is still a pretty good chunk of the year given the time it takes in order to produce this show and deliver the quality that we’ve come to know.

Oliver has developed a great niche for the program with his writers. It’s not a panel show like “Real Time with Bill Maher,” and unlike “The Daily Show,” it can spend way more than half of its program every week on just one solitary story. While they are often hilarious, they often do point out a level of hypocrisy and a need to change among government institutions or private corporations. His takedowns of food in the prison systems, coupled with the Miss America pageant, were both entirely memorable.

One thing that is very interesting abut this announcement, at least for now, is the timing of it all. In renewing this particular show right now, HBO is making sure that their commitment to Oliver is clear, and there is no question about whether or not he will leave the show for Comedy Central. He was never a serious candidate to host “The Daily Show,” but this is a reminder to America that he is perfectly happy where he is. Yesterday, current correspondent Jessica Williams dismissed the notion of her replacing Jon Stewart.

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