I am a big fan of satirical news shows as they inform the general masses about important issues but deliver it in a way that keeps the audience engaged throughout the entire discussion. For years I have been watching shows such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report that share a similar presentational structure of getting as many topics in a short half an hour segment daily, but more accurately it would be twenty four minutes due to the commercials.

Last year a new breed of satire news was born and it’s called Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and that is what we watched in the week 2 screening. Instead of having a show that airs on a daily basis, the producers of Last Week Tonight opted to have a one show a week format where the presenter John Oliver recaps the week’s biggest stories. Unlike The Daily Show, which was also displayed in the screening, this is not a parody news program with comedians pretending to be correspondents. This can be notices instantly just through the opening sequences of the two shows. While The Daily Show tries to emulate all the conventions of an actual news program, Last Week Tonight displays many iconic artifacts from history and pop culture with John Oliver at the center of it all, conveying to the audience the variety of topics that the show covers.

Perhaps the biggest difference between this show and the others is its long form segment, which is deemed as the main story of the week. After giving a summary of the week’s major news stories, Oliver moves on to discuss a single important issue for an average of fifteen minutes. John Oliver himself said in an interview with national post “in commercial TV there is literally a point at which you have to say, ‘We’ll be back after this’ and then Doritos will talk for 45 seconds. So as soon as we realized that we don’t have to be done after nine minutes, we can go for 18 if we want, then we thought that once a week we’ll do one story in significant depth and we would build the show around that.” This is unthinkable for other shows due to a more restricted scheduling on their network but Oliver thoroughly analyses an issue and not just skimming over it. This gives him time to explain what the issue is and why it’s important for the viewer to be well informed about the subject in the first place. The level of investigative reporting is shown when they present a historical context and a multitude of examples that help the audience solidify their understanding.

Unlike its Comedy Central counter parts, Last Week airs on HBO and there are no ad breaks and the censors are much more lenient. Perhaps the most important fact about the show airing on HBO is that since the network doesn’t have to rely on money from selling ad space to corporations to finance the show, this virtually eliminates any conflict of interest on what stories are presented. If a show is sponsored by a major corporation that are in the news for negative reasons the show has no choice but to not report the story. This combination of non – biased, creative freedom that is given to the show’s producers make Last Week Tonight with John Oliver a unique show that instead of rapid firing breaking news stories at the audience, it takes a ‘quality over quantity’ approach to news stories as it takes its time to ensure that after the credits roll the viewer has a much better underrating of the world they live in.

http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/television/the-john-oliver-effect-how-the-daily-show-alum-became-the-most-trusted-man-in-america