Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Pig scams & IVF

After the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver premiere on HBO, obviously we wondered if there was any way top it. You can’t just offer a Supreme Court Justice a million dollars a year to leave every week!

At the start of the show, Oliver also addressed a pretty important and topical subject: The IVF ruling in Alabama and the large-scale repercussions of it. This was tied in to a number of different rulings, and this was, for the second week, the show taking a look at the role of the courts in influencing society on a larger scale.

Now, let’s get more into the main segment, which is where we will say that the show did not even try to replicate what they did with Clarence Thomas last week. Instead, they took a complete 180 and focused on pig-butchering scams, something that has taken the internet by storm but also much more of an evergreen subject. If you aren’t familiar with this at all, this was a pretty educational segment! Is it going to go viral? Probably not.

We do tend to think that in general, Last Week Tonight used the show this week to do some of what it does best. Sure, it made you laugh, but at the same time it did so through the lens of some important subjects. This main segment in particular is one of the reasons we’re bummed that YouTube viewers are going to have to wait until Thursday in order to see it — there is a lot to actually take away from this, especially when it comes to people being exploited on social media.

Will we ever get another update on the Thomas offer?

In all honestly, probably not — and largely because it’s a really tough thing to give an update on! There’s about a 0.00001% chance anything comes from this down the road.

What did you think about this Last Week Tonight episode, including the pig-butchering scam segment?

Go ahead and let us know in the comments! Once you do just that, remember to keep coming back for some additional updates.