Hello, buglers! John Oliver has a weekly show, "Last Week Tonight"

Starts Apr 27th. Runs Sunday nights at 11pm on HBO in the U.S. Half-hour.

They started up a twitter feed, which is very, very, VERY Bugle-like in its headlines:

http://twitter.com/LastWeekTonight
http://www.iamjohnoliver.com

http://www.hbo.com/last-week-tonight-with-john-oliver

fuck you chris!

Found this interview, which unfortunately doesn't mention if Andy Zaltsman will be involved or not:

http://m.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/john-oliver-of-the-daily-show-gets-his-own-fake-news-program-on-hbo/2014/04/02/addd639a-ba63-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html

What's even more horrifying is that he's a year younger than me.

http://defamer.gawker.com/heres-the-first-episode-of-last-week-tonight-with-john-1568756065

HBO posted the first ep to youtube, but strangely won't allow embeds

Also geoblocked.

dude's killing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPQ44RDOAx4

not in that clip but his Morrissey impression was amazing

The Inquiring Minds podcast had a nice little interview with him last week, where he points out that "This world will be a giant ball of fire before it stops being funny."

hate this guy

Finally catching up on eps; this show is great.

Bugle on hiatus until September--
Fuck you, HBO!

hate this guy

― conrad, Monday, May 19, 2014 5:31 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

0_0

this show is better than both colbert and jon stewart

^^^ truth

i wonder if that's because he only has to produce one episode a week?

never seen this prog

It's great. It manages to be both really funny and really angry, which is a difficult line to walk.

you can watch most of it via its youtube page, which is how I've been seeing it.

definitely better than daily show, tho it's probably on the level with what colbert and his writers could do for a once a week thing.

i think the lack of an interview helps this week tonight quite a lot in terms of momentum (plus - i don't remember oliver being a great interviewer from his stint hosting the daily show). i dig the compiled clips of stupid news tropes to transition between bits but i think it's the kinda thing that will seem played out pretty soon, akin to the "better know a district" series or other colbert bits

i think the lack of an interview helps

omg yes, so much. I never watch TDS or Colbert interviews any more. Really funny and really angry stops dead when Ben Affleck has a movie to promote.

With Colbert about to (presumably) shift towards ditching the character, Oliver's timing is even better.

i keep hoping he'll bring on his Bugle cohost Andy as a special guest & do 30 solid minutes of puns

love this so much

longform ranting oliver is the greatest gift to comedy-news, i am so happy he's getting so much love & has such a great team to enhance his talents.

colbert interviews are always entertaining some more than others obviously

I always skip Stewart/Colbert interviews

Andy should totally appear.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=RealAnimalsFakePaws

some of this is really fantastic

this guy is such an uninsightful bore

my wife is really into it but the pattern of dissect-workings-of-minor-issue-that-is-actually-result-of-much-bigger-issue and then turn it into some brief social media hashtag cause leaves me fairly uninspired

like yes predatory lending is a problem and this country totally fucks the poor I wonder why that is #capitalism

you two are lames

his jokes are funny, it's the polemical aspects of it that I find a bit pointless

liberal panic monster of the week as entertainment only goes so far for me anyway but oliver seems particularly insincere, i don't buy that he really cares about anything he talks about moreso than any other given buzzfeed reader

as far as Daily Show spinoffs go at this point I prefer Wilmore, which is at least a bit unpredictable and with a variety of voices

yeah, i'm down with wilmore. even just thinking about the two of them oliver seems like such a cranky fuck in comparison

he is very very funny and i admire how well researched his show is

oliver i mean

oliver is a slightly-retuned version of Jon Stewart with the energy he had ten years ago, so it's good to me.
i wanted wilmore to be better but finding it generally pretty boring and uneven, and the panel segments to be a chore. it's missing a spark somewhere.

i love oliver, tone of the show is v similar to the bugle

Oliver and Wilmore have two different aims imo, so it's hard to determine who's doing a better job. I like both. The fact that Oliver only airs once a week makes it seem like his show has higher stakes, though.

but oliver seems particularly insincere, i don't buy that he really cares about anything he talks about moreso than any other given buzzfeed reader

I totally do, based mainly on having listened to the Bugle for ages. There have been lots of moments when one or other of them edge close to being dead serious angry/upset. Oliver being married to a veteran (combat medic I think?) makes me pay attention to his show's pieces on the military.

sometimes the level of cynicism on ilx is just astounding

I don't think this latest rant was that good, and the hashtag was dumb and useless. In general, this season doesn't seem as good as the first, though that's probably rose-tinted glasses since it was a debut and all that. Some of the hashtag-stuff has been good, such as when it's used to counter the bullying behavious by the president of Ecaudor, or when it shines a light on Philip Morris trying to get away with treating poor countries horrendously without anyone noticing. Here, more exposure could conceivably make a difference. But this rant on municipal violations seemed much less pointed than it could have been, and because of Ferguson everyone has been sorta thinking about it recently anyway. Just doing a 'do you know that this exists?' on one of the biggest news stories recently is not LWTwJO at it's finest.

I only see the 20-minute videos that go on youtube, so I might be missing something, but I thought the NCAA one from last week was great. Nothing that anyone who pays attention to sports doesn't already know but it was nice to hear sharp jokes and criticism from someone in the media aside from, I dunno, Deadspin.

JFC you fucking idiots, John Oliver's show is foregrounding shit we've been ranting about for a fucking decade plus on here. Remember that this shit has to permeate a thick fecal slurry of constant, un-mute-able noise from a thousand media sphincters shitting out endless social clickbait distraction. There's a very narrow finite amount of socially or culturally acceptable topics to talk about in a week's amount of air-time, and this show can get a thing that's _rather_ important out there to the point where something can actually happen. Crashing the FCC's servers about net.neutrality is a great example.

Larry Wilmore's show is great and worthwhile, too. Once in a while, he'll play a deep-bench nerd ref card that tips the hand of either his or his writing staff's obsessions into nerdshit.

None of this shit is fucking perfect and will never be. At this point, enjoy what we can get of non-horrible cultural material being produced. This is mass entertainment blasted at millions of people on a nightly to weekly basis, and its in a digestible format that other worthy causes shared on social media don't reach. These guys can get previously unaddressed topics to get mentioned on either Headline News or take yer pick of breakfast chat shows, or at least are the closest methods to do so.

In other words, I agree with gr8080.

kingfish otm

sorry but obviously Oliver is a dead-souled cynical charlatan from some country that probably doesn't even exist anymore who came here to exploit America's obsessions with Net Neutrality and FIFA for $$$$ and proximity to Bill Mahar

er

lol

Well THAT happened.

I don't even regularly watch this show but caught it last night randomly, excellent interview.

just watched the most recent ep (the one with no audience that's just in front of a white background) and man is it weird to see this guy do his thing with no audience response whatsoever

i actually found him less annoying doing this for some reason.

the colbert episode without the audience kind of was reminding me of Eric Andre.

I enjoyed that one. but I think Colbert is often better than his material

its definitely odd and kinda fascinating to see these shows that are heavily dependent on audience response (see also: the WWE) just plow forward with the same sort of scripts.

Definitely been enjoying his work during the last month

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4cea5oObY

phenomenal

Really want to see this but they fucking block it outside of the US and the copies Ive found on YT have evasive edits in play that make it hard to look at.

as ever, crazy condescending with an incoherent thesis, but some interesting information/research and uncovers some new targets for justified outrage, but there's always this feeling from John that "I know how to fix this" and, no. No you don't

Really want to see this but they fucking block it outside of the US and the copies Ive found on YT have evasive edits in play that make it hard to look at.

if I point vpn at France or Netherlands I can usually watch it.

but there's always this feeling from John that "I know how to fix this" and, no. No you don't

???? this sounds like projection

If anything I think one if his trademarks is that he constantly underscores that he often does not have a solution and wishes he does, because he is heartbroken or furious. And barring that, he'll bust out a squirrel suit.

I do like the show but I have reservations. First that he always says things are brilliant or hilarious when I don't find them to be so, Second that I'm used to him being an English person on The Bugle and find his references to American culture strange and disconcerting, I get that he is reading a script but it just sounds wrong. Like the "Drumpf" episode, it isn't a funny joke anyway, and the bit about "the word 'trump' sounds impressive" is annoying because he grew up in the West Midlands in the 80s and I can assure you that the word 'trump' meant "fart" among kids in the West Midlands in the 80s.

drumpf was bad

i think the show's writing has sharpened in the past 1-2 years though, and (possible controp) the jokes have worked better without an audience

I liked how he ended the show by turning it over to the very righteous anger of a black woman protestor. certainly not saying Oliver deserves a medal for that or anything, but it does seem like the opposite of "condescending."

I agree with you Brad on both those claims: the first couple of quarantine eps were rough and awkward but I think it is better when he's not pitching the jokes to the back row

I don't fuck you's and suck my dick's from a talking head as some sort of performative validation of my feelings (or as instruction how to feel). That's what I find condescending

I really don't read him as ever telling you how you should feel, but rather, particularly in episodes like this, that he works from a starting point of trying to focus his sadness and rage and working from a point of empathy. But I don't see condescension in him at all. If I think performative condescension, I think Maher and not Oliver.

If we can’t all come together over saying fuck you to tucker carlson then what do we even have left?

fuck you i won't feel how you tell me

honestly thought the "Drumpf" thing was a parody of Krassenstein shit

i much prefer his show without an audience (even the small one he has). This week's was one of his best.

honestly thought the "Drumpf" thing was a parody of Krassenstein shit

― frogbs, Wednesday, June 10, 2020 9:54 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Didn't it predate Krassensteins? I thought Drumpf was before he was elected president, like "this'll be the thing that ends his candidacy."

could be...I thought the joke was that none of the things that would've killed any other campaign had any effect on him, so the "this'll be the thing that ends his candidacy" thing was sort of a joke onto itself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_(Last_Week_Tonight)#%22Make_Donald_Drumpf_Again%22

"Drumpf" was before Trump was elected. It was also the first time that show really addressed Donald Trump's campaign, having mostly set aside to talk about other issues at the time.

i agree about his quarantine episodes being better, and i think part of it is that it eliminates my least favorite part of the show: when it all develops into a big stage production at the end and there's music and props and costumes and fireworks etc

That was one of many reasons I tuned out for sure

The Police segment proves he's much more tolerable when he tones down the shtick by 75% or so

for as much as i complain about john oliver, i usually end up watching almost all the episodes each season.

Casting the Drumpf thing as a parody of tryhard #resistance shit is revisionism

that segment was tryhard without all that shit tbh
that said i think Oliver is far more good than bad, especially his work lately

idk y'all are probably right. maybe I just don't get British humor

that said yes the latest episode was very good and I think he works better now without the audience, unlike the other late night shows which just don't really work anymore

the facial recognition episode was terrifying. particularly the bit where it was able to find a 30-something news anchor's teenage photo

I've told this story in another thread but I was pretty alarmed when Facebook tried to tag me in someone's photo from the work Christmas party, despite the fact that A) I'm way in the background and B) we have no mutual friends. my 'hope' was that it's just using location data but even still that seems pretty questionable

i got locked out of facebook the other week and they 'needed' my phone number and a non-blurry photograph in order to 'verify my account'. i assume this was for stuff like the above.

(they should have my number because i had the app installed a few years ago. but they probably didn't have a photo, at least not one where i've been tagged)

my friend was in New Orleans for her 40th bday and kissed some random dude. that was the only contact they ever had. 5 years later FB popped up his profile asking if she knew him.

He's been searching for her on there

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

don't think a single American TV journalist summed up the Israeli/Palestinian conflict better than John Oliver last night

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2021 season is nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

the episode last week on police interrogations was really good. actually brought back a memory of being 13 and getting "busted" for 2 counts of shoplifting even though I didn't steal anything the first time, and wasn't even there the second time. they used all the tactics in this episode, the whole "We have you dead to rights here" thing, the "I'm just trying to help you but I can't if you're gonna lie to me" line, the "how can you be sure you didn't block it out of your memory" argument, using my "confession" even though a minute later I said "no, I didn't do it, I want to see the video" (what do you know, they didn't have it, but if I wanted to challenge it they were going to slap on another charge of "lying to a police officer"), fucking wild to see it all laid out like this. nobody believed me that I didn't do it! my parents didn't trust me for months after that! I thought I was going insane!!

Racist idiots next door called teh police n me for trying to get them to leave a local paper I have delivered alone. I think that woman is a headcase. I 'd had the husband standing outside my door threatening me then 20 minutes later a cop is knocking on my door.
So have always wondered what their required result was. I think they are beyond belief. His behaviour has left a lot to be desired at other time.s
So I've had that running through my head when I watch things like that.
Am hearing that the Texas Death Row inmate who was interrogated when she was laready in extreme stress from her daughter dying mentioned as having a support/protest campaign talked about on a few podcasts I've heard thsi week. Think its teh same one.

& the night these idiots were trying that on with me I was actually trying to take part in a Human Rights campaign for First nations people in Canada. Unbelievable. White privileged morons.

those sketches they do at the end of episodes are kinda hit & miss but the Korean Subway drama had me laughing nonstop. I would totally watch that series.

that sort of episode is the show at its best, tackling the sort of questions that are on the back of everyone's mind but never get any "real" news coverage. I live in a town of 55,000 and we have 6 Subways. one of them is literally less than a quarter mile away from another. nobody is ever at any of them.

agreed, good topic selection and ending skit. almost unbelievable that the real thing exists

credit for incorporating it into the plot though, unlike this scene they showed from an actual #1 US TV show which still feels utterly unreal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE

lol we watched Happy Gilmore with my son this weekend. I hadn't seen it probably since it came out on VHS and had totally forgotten that it was also a 92 minute Subway commercial.

fun gimmick last week they did one episode about HOAs and then another for anyone under 35 (who will never own a house) about Chuck E Cheese. no surprise but the Chuck E Cheese episode was a lot funnier

yeah, it was... though i kinda wish it had a better point to make me sit through the 30 minutes of that. At least the HOA one had some coherent point to it

Oh my god I was wondering what was up with that billboard!! That’s a quarter mile away from where I used to live!

lol!!

first two eps this season have been solid, can't believe I hadn't heard of "pig butchering" before, I get those texts all the time and even respond to them sometimes. big yikes when it's revealed who's actually sending them though