USA TODAY International Edition
John Oliver isn’t surprised by Trump’s flurry of action
‘ Last Week’ won’t focus solely on new presidency
Late- night TV shows may be grappling with how to handle comedy in the age of Trump. and how to avoid, as John Oliver puts it, “the low- hanging fruit” of the president’s combative tweet-storms in favor of substance. But as he touted Last Week Tonight, his Emmy- winning HBO series that returns for a fourth season Sunday ( 11 p. m. ET/ PT), Oliver says Trump’s flurry of executive orders since Inauguration Day should astonish no one.
“Any surprise at what he’s doing is not necessarily earned, because this was the only way this was heading,” Oliver said in an interview Monday. “I always believed he was going to do what he said, which is why I was so against him becoming president. That doesn’t make it any less viscerally horrifying. It’s just that when he said things like ‘ Muslim ban,’ I kind of assumed he was going to do some version of that. I think he’s going to try to put that stupid wall up, ( and) I know there are lots of people who thought that wasn’t going to happen.”
Last Week aired just one postelection show before taking an extended winter break, during which Oliver and his team of writers worked on long- term, deeply researched segments. Only eight of last year’s 30 episodes featured main stories on the presidential race; the rest veered from Herbalife and other multilevel marketing schemes to medical debt, how to create a fake church and the fate of print journalism, with a spot- on parody of Spotlight, the Oscar- winning 2015 film.
Oliver’s personal favorite: “Irredeemably stupid” segments that represent “a silly, spectacular waste of HBO’s resources,” such as a segment last March in which audio of Supreme Court justices accompanied a tableau of dog jurists, in a commentary on the court’s ban of cameras.
Last Week averaged 5.7 million viewers last season across all of HBO’s platforms, its largest audience yet, and millions more for YouTube clips of the show’s segments.
But the new Trump administration, a likely focus of Sunday’s season opener, is not an automatic fountain of satire.
“One of the most frustrating things that well- intentioned people say is, ‘ Wow, your job is really easy now. He does your job for you.’ And that’s really not the case,” Oliver said. “In a sense it’s harder, because there’s so much appealing stuff to get through before you get to something which is really difficult. But the Obama administration was fascinating to pull apart in its own way; the hypocrisies in there were very interesting to mine.”
Despite the all- consuming election season, Oliver has no plans to go all- Trump now that the presidency has begun.
“I’m very anxious to not make it all Trump all the time, just on the level of interest and what the human soul can sustain.”