Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: The wait is almost over…
We’ve already seen plenty of people out there already giving Oliver grief for such a long hiatus, but we do think viewers often forget that this show, while technically a late-night series, is not all that similar in setup to The Late Show or some of the other network fare. On those shows, the majority of the non-monologue material is generated from guest interviews or performances. Much of that happens in the moment with maybe a little bit of pre-interview guidance along the way. These shows, however, are much more meticulously produced. All of the content comes from Oliver himself and it all needs to be thoroughly planned ahead and researched.
To put things in a different perspective, many other late-night shows are giving you one-page book reports; meanwhile, Last Week Tonight is giving you dissertations. While the show has been off the air for months, that doesn’t mean the folks behind the scenes stopped working all that time. It takes more than a week to research some of the stories that they discuss, so we imagine that there are already multiple weekly features in production behind the scenes. Oliver balances out some of this material (his longer feature segments) with something a little more similar to an opening monologue at the start touching on extremely-current events.
Ultimately, it’s pretty clear that Oliver has a lot to discuss — it’s easy to make that joke because of the current Administration, but the irony here really is that you could make that same joke on an almost-weekly basis due to the current speed of the current news cycle. It feels like there is almost always something happening every second of the day.
Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, we suggest that you check out the new Last Week Tonight with John Oliver season 5 preview below. That may help to tide you over with some assorted silliness, plus a Harambe joke in 2018 for good measure.
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