It’s been a rough couple of months for fake news, both the kind that is intentionally fake (the end of The Colbert Report, the departure of Jon Stewart from The Daily Show) and the kind that is supposed to be real (pour one out for Brian Williams). But today brings a great development, a spot of warmth in this icy, already-interminable week: HBO just renewed Last Week Tonight With John Oliver for two more seasons.
Each season will be 35 episodes long. Season three premieres in 2016, season four the following year. In a press release, president of HBO programming Michael Lombardo said that Oliver’s “unique ability to deliver socially significant commentary week after week, along with his innate comedic brilliance, puts John in a class by himself.”
When Oliver’s show premiered two years ago, the comedy-news-hybrid space was a crowded one. How many fake-takes on the news can one audience possibly sustain? But Oliver managed to build a show that feels, in hindsight, like the kind of series The Daily Show has been working towards all this time. Watch all three shows back-to-back and you can feel the generational divide between the Comedy Central shows and what Oliver’s created at HBO. Stewart and Colbert produced shows that acted as reactions to other forms of television. Oliver’s show is a reaction, really, to the internet. Oliver’s predecessors served as an antidote to the hypocrisy and flashiness of cable news, politicians and government; Oliver’s show is structured as an antidote to a media landscape packed with hot take after hot take, where speed too often prevails over substance.
Some of that is function following form: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report get chopped into bite-size chunks by commercials, but Oliver, free from the need to make room for advertisers, can do deep-dives on complicated issues for 15 minutes at a time. He works with a week of news, not just a 24-hour news cycle’s worth; he can be choosier about what merits screen time and what isn’t worth discussing.
And some of that comes from Oliver putting in the work with his staff to build narratives — not just jokes, but thoughtful, analytical stories — that are compelling for a quarter of an hour. While the other men of late night score the bulk of their next-day clicks with shorter, buzzier sketches, Oliver has found a way to make a monologue-style piece the most entertaining, shareable part of his show. (When was the last time anyone forwarded you a link to Fallon’s monologue? Exactly.) Oliver upheld the Daily Show tradition of calling out the news for favoring optics over accuracy, like in his now-famous bit criticizing the practice of featuring one climate change denier for every climate change scientist, as if to suggest each point of view is equally valid.
Oliver focuses on stories that mainstream media, including his alma mater, tend to ignore, like the Indian parliamentary elections. His work more closely resembles investigative journalism than it resembles, say, a through-the-looking-glass version of Fox and Friends, as Colbert was designed to do.
With Colbert setting his character aside to go to CBS and join the endless parade of white dudes in suits helming the late night desks in September, Stewart heading who knows where who knows when, and Larry Wilmore still finding his footing, Oliver finds himself — suddenly, surprisingly — in the position of being the most seasoned comedy news anchor on TV. And that’s not even counting David Letterman, whose place Colbert will take, and Craig Ferguson, who ended his run on The Late Late Show last December.
No doubt the executives over at Comedy Central are having not-so-tiny aneurysms over the fact that they lost John Oliver to HBO, now that they’re looking at two high-profile vacancies to fill. Sure, Wilmore’s The Nightly Show is well-reviewed and picking up steam, but Colbert is not so easy to replace, and drawing viewers to Wilmore’s new program will only be harder when Stewart ditches the Daily Show desk later this year. (When Stewart announced that he’d be moving on from the series, he revealed that he doesn’t have an exact timeline yet for when his final episode will be.) In the wake of Stewart’s announcement, Viacom’s stock dropped by $350 million.
It’s a pretty big vote of confidence on HBO’s part to bet on Oliver for the next three years — as the second season only premiered two weeks ago — but given the acclaim surrounding Oliver’s work, it’s not too surprising that they want to keep him around. The long segments of his show, in which Oliver methodically dismantles, say, the notion that the Miss America pageant is really in the scholarship business, are smash hits on social media. News outlets are so quick to post these inevitably viral videos, along with the outlet’s hyperbolic verb of choice — “rips!” “slams!” “eviscerates!” — that keeping track of who can share the clips the fastest, and siphon the most traffic off Oliver’s work is its own internet parlor game.