Is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver new tonight … and is it okay?

Is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver new tonight on HBO? Let’s start things off by saying this: We’ve been fairly lucky as of late. It feels like we’ve had a rather-good chance as of late to see a lot of new episodes and the see the show, in turn, cover a lot of ground. There have been stories about China, about advancements in genetics, about the Mexican election, and about all sorts of political subjects.

Yet, there is no new episode airing on the network tonight, mostly because this is the pattern that the show tends to follow. There are new episodes for a few weeks and, in the aftermath of that, there tends to be a break for a little while.

So why does Oliver’s show take so many breaks? This is a question that we often see asked in the midst of all of the hiatuses that happen here, but as it turns out, there is a pretty good reason for it. Last Week Tonight doesn’t operate like your typical late-night show in that most of the segments are scripted out far in advance and aren’t exactly free-wheeling at all. They are also heavily researched for accuracy. While this show is not journalism — it’s entertainment — it also does need to be put together properly in order to ensure that there are no problems down the line. They’ve already taken on one lawsuit because of Murray Energy (which they anticipated), but they certainly don’t want any others. That’s why many of their segments take an extensive amount of time. That’s also why there are as many breaks as there are.

New episodes of Last Week Tonight are going to resume a little bit later this summer; like many other shows that go for the bulk of the year, Oliver’s series is going to take a little bit of time off during the month of July. Amazingly, this hiatus seems appropriately timed in some ways. If you were going to take a little bit of time off, it does feel like he stumbled into a relatively decent time in which to make it happen. There wasn’t as many headlines over the course of the past several days as we’ve seen in the past couple of months — though, to be fair, in this climate there’s always something to talk about.

Related – Be sure to see some more news on this past Last Week Tonight episode

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