John Oliver does not agree with HBO’s decision to delay clips from “Last Week Tonight” from streaming on YouTube. While the main segment of each “Last Week Tonight” episode was previously uploaded to YouTube the day after airing on HBO, the network changed course staring with the Season 11 premiere in February and now uploads new “Last Week Tonight” videos to YouTube on a four-day delay.
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“It’s massively frustrating to me,” Oliver told The New York Times on “The Interview” podcast . “I was not happy with it at all.”
Variety reported in February that the driving force behind delaying “Last Week Tonight” clips to YouTube was for the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned HBO to get more people to sign up for Max. Oliver’s talk show recently won the Emmy for outstanding scripted variety series over “Saturday Night Live.” The show has won a total of 30 Emmys over the course of its run.
“What I love about having the show on YouTube is that we can reach beyond HBO subscribers,” Oliver told The Times. “That feels really important to me. I really, really appreciate the fact that they do that. I would rather they did it straight after the show the way we’ve always done it, but I’m very grateful that they are willing to still do it at all.”
Oliver is currently in his 11th season of “Last Week Tonight,” and the show will air new episodes through the 2024 presidential election in November. The Times recalled that Oliver once said he would not cover a debate on his show, and it’s a mentality he stands by.
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“I guess the Biden-Trump debate was pretty consequential because Biden isn’t the nominee anymore, so it’d be hard to push back on that. It’s very hard to say how consequential it is in real time, isn’t it? That’s the problem,” Oliver said. “And so I don’t know what we could add to the commentary on those debates that isn’t widely available everywhere else. It feels like to a certain extent, our show has moved into an area where we are very much slow cooking, and so there’s not much there for us.”
“Also, those debates tend to be pretty uninspiring to me,” he added. “As a form of entertainment, yeah, you could definitely be entertained by what happened. And I guess, however much better it felt to watch it, it is depressing that it’s this close. That’s my aftertaste from it. That it’s still this close when everyone can see what you can see in that debate. It’s hard not to find that somewhere between depressing, infuriating and outrageous.”
Listen to Oliver’s full chat on The New York Times’ ‘The Interview” podcast here . New episodes of “Last Week Tonight” air Sunday nights on HBO.
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