John Oliver Is Still ‘Massively’ Frustrated HBO Moved His ‘Last Week Tonight’ YouTube Clips to Thursdays

John Oliver still isn’t happy about HBO’s decision to no longer drop YouTube clips of “Last Week Tonight” on Mondays.

“It’s massively frustrating to me. I was not happy with it at all,” Oliver said during a recent interview with New York Times podcasts. “I hope it works because I worry about it … It remains to be proven to me this was necessary.”

Since the premiere of “Last Week Tonight” in 2014, the series has posted its A story — which involves Oliver’s deep dive into the big story of the week — on YouTube the day after the show’s Sunday night episode. This strategy helped the series gain its large following over the past decade. But starting in February of this year, HBO announced it would instead be dropping these clips on Thursdays moving forward.

“When ‘Last Week Tonight With John Oliver’ premiered on HBO, the convenience of watching on Max did not exist, so YouTube allowed flexible viewing for the main story as well as promotional exposure,” an HBO representative told TheWrap at the time. “We are now delaying that availability and hope those fans choose to watch the entire show on Max.”

If Oliver had his way, people would watch “Last Week Tonight” in “its entire form” — not just through clips. “This is partly self-serving, not just that I’d like my employer to be happy, but we do take a lot of effort to make sure the show makes sense as a whole. So if we’re doing a very bleak main story, we like putting real dumb stuff around it,” the comedian explained. A recent example of this was when the series paired its exposé on death penalty drugs with a silly segment about Ilgar Pashayev, a stock photo model from Azerbaijan. But at the same time, Oliver sees a great benefit in posting his deep dives to YouTube.

“What I love about having the show on YouTube is the A story, we can reach beyond HBO subscribers. That’s really important to me. I think it’s a good advert for HBO. I think it reflected really well on them and still does, the fact that they release this main story,” he said. “I would rather they did it straight after the show the way that they’ve always done it, but I’ve very grateful that they’re willing to do it at all.”

When asked if he would still be interested in doing late night in the same format 10 years from now, Oliver said “I hope so if I’m still alive … I have no idea what the future of television is or of late night. There will be a future, but I don’t know what it will look like yet. And I have an active interest for sure in knowing the answer to that.”

“Last Week Tonight” airs Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.

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