Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a half an hour weekly news satire show carried by HBO. Often simple in format, it heavily features its titular host sitting at a desk speaking directly to the audience, not unlike those featured in news and current affairs broadcasts and of course, late-night talkshows; that have often featured segments similar to Last Week Tonight in concept, covering hot-button issues with a comedic flair. Similarly to a news anchor, Oliver goes over news highlights and sets up segments, graphics and video packages that appear on-screen beginning with smaller quicker segments before diving into the show’s main story. One could consider Last Week Tonight to be ‘infotainment/edutainment’, a fluid mix of informative reporting for the ‘working adults’ of the nuclear home as well as appealing to a wider audience through its topicality and humour.
While many elements line up with the prim and proper image viewers expect from a news show from the setup to Oliver himself being an educated middle-aged white British man. The delivery and tone are where Last Week Tonight definitively deviates — rather than the authoritative voice that we are accustomed to when we think politics and the like, Oliver and co. aim for laughs to break the tension between reporting on various heavy and polarising topics such as the Trump administration, the death penalty and Brexit to name a few from the past year. Given that many are ongoing issues, updates occasionally occur throughout the season, particularly if the show has pushed a call-to-action to a specific cause. While many topics that are covered in the main segment concern the US audience in particular, due to the influence of American media and politics, the show has had widespread interest in many English speaking countries including Australia where the show’s reruns are aired on the Comedy Channel via Foxtel.
There are a few factors that have made Last Week Tonight function well in the age of post-broadcast, social media and SVOD services. Oliver’s demeanour varies from show to show but generally, he presents harrowing happenings in a fairly deadpan fashion as he builds to a punchline which often breaks the conventions of the newsdesk wildly (bad-good Photoshop jobs, clips of cringe-inducing statements/moments and celebrity sing-a-longs are par for the course). These moments tap into his timing as a comedian and performer — giving the show an evergreen factor (or at worst the shelf-life of the issue covered) like any enjoyable well-scripted standup routine with a live studio audience to boot. Also given the show’s relatively short segments, informative and topical nature topped off with frequent self-contained gags make the show clips ideal for sharing online which has led the show to make extra/web-exclusive content during their off-seasons.
