John Oliver, International Man of Sympathy? The Host Takes It All In and Pushes It Back Out As Season 9 of LAST WEEK TONIGHT Begins

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede John Oliver, world expert. Or at least, global sounding board? It was fascinating to be part of a recent virtual roundtable interview with Oliver and a handful of international journalists, as he set up Season 9 of HBO’s LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER, which debuts Sunday, Feb. 20, only on Crave. It became apparent quickly, as the journalists brought up various situations occurring in their own countries, that everyone was aching to get Oliver’s take, and expecting him to be up to date on everything. There’s an election coming up in Brazil, is John going to talk about that on the show this season? There’s an election coming up in France, what about that? Colombia. Taiwan. Great Britain The United States. Canada. There are issues everywhere, and everyone wants those issues to be covered on LAST WEEK TONIGHT. “It does feel like whenever you have countries saying, ‘please talk about our election,’ it’s not because you think everything’s going great,” Oliver said with a chuckle. “Nobody’s gonna say, ‘please talk about our election, because I think we’ve got a really good menu of candidates, there is no bad option here.’ It is really someone saying, ‘please share this pain. Please tell people what we’re going through.’ ” Oliver takes it all in, and pushes it back out, with his unique mix of seriousness and goofiness. The efforts of everyone who works on LAST WEEK TONIGHT have hit the mark, not only through the numerical evidence of 23 EMMY® AWARD victories, but also with the show having become a destination spot for viewers seeking fresh and unfettered takes on systemic issues. “We move away from the firehose of information that everybody has seen, and look at something that has not been the focus of everyone’s attention that week,” Oliver said. “And yeah, we are definitely drawn to things that are a little dark or complicated, but I do like having the ability to do incredibly stupid things as well. If we’ve done too many dark stories in a row, it’s basically like giving people dessert at the end of a meal full of vegetables.” But there’s no doubt the world has become an angrier place in the past few years, as people everywhere seem to be more comfortable expressing their outrage, through words or deeds. Has this impacted how LAST WEEK TONIGHT is made? And it wouldn’t necessarily be a negative thing – it might make the show better, or sharper, if extreme and perhaps polar-opposite reactions to almost any subject are anticipated. “It’s a really interesting question, because I think you’re right – I think good-faith criticism is an overwhelmingly positive thing,” Oliver said. “We try and reckon with what the good-faith criticism to a story would be while making a story, just to make sure that you then solidify the argument that you’re making. But as for bad-faith noise, that is best ignored.” Those lines can get blurred at times, Oliver admitted. “I know that when criticism gets voluminous, it can be hard to distinguish between the two – but it’s worth trying,” he said. “I don’t think (increased public anger over everything) has fundamentally changed how we make the show, although I guess if it were 15 years ago, just the general volume of the internet was lower then. But the only way we know how to make the show is with a pretty severe research and fact-checking process. Because one, we want to get it right. And two, on many stories, if we get it wrong, we are going to get sued. Not that we haven’t been sued. It’s just that we haven’t been sued and lost. That’s the thing – the bar isn’t, ‘try not to get sued,’ it’s, ‘make sure that even when you are sued, you win that lawsuit.’ ” Either way, Oliver acknowledged that the LAST WEEK TONIGHT team usually doesn’t have time to engage in large-scale debates after stories have aired. “I try not to spend too much time looking for reaction to our stories, because we’re so worried about the next one,” he said. “We generally work on six main stories at one time. So even when we’ve finished one, I’m worried about the next five. So to your point, we try to fold some of the reactions, or criticism, into the body of the story. So by the time we’ve finished it, to be honest, I’m done. Rare would be the case where we would then get into a back-and-forth over something – unless it is very fun.” billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv