Those destroyers just keep on coming. First there was Jon Stewart. Then we had Stephen Colbert. And now, for your edification and delight, there is John Oliver, an extra-erudite, super-truthy, this-time-it’s-serious British-born comic who for the last 24 weeks has spent his Sunday evenings laying out what in the week’s news was worthy of consideration and what was not, calmly walking his audience through one tricky topic after another, and informing the country at large how it should go about navigating the vast, dirty, and irredeemably corrupted informational morass that the explosion of the Internet has occasioned. On November 9, Oliver wrapped up the first season of his HBO show, Last Week Tonight — its semi-self-effacing slogan: “Just like the nightly news. Only weeklier” — and took a little time off to bask in the lavish, ubiquitous praise that America’s arbiters of taste have thrown his way, and, in good time, to figure out how best to capitalize on the suggestion that Oliver had finally managed to take the popular comedian-is-upset-by-the-news genre and do something substantial with it.
The “magic” of Oliver’s show, The Atlantic’s Terrance Ross proposed in August of this year, is to be found in its star’s ability to take “a seemingly complicated issue, remove the talking points and cultural baggage surrounding it, break it into understandable parts — and then slowly rebuild.” This process, Ross added, is “making a difference in the real world.” In The New Yorker three months earlier, Ian Crouch had put the case a little differently. “Rather than become the leader of an audience of acolytes,” Crouch submitted, Oliver “seems to be out to subtly correct his audience’s prejudices and blind spots. If Stewart is evangelical, Oliver is professorial.” This being so, Crouch concluded, Oliver’s offering is “akin to the current rush of explainer journalism, in which a smart person more or less reads the newspaper for you, tells you why this or that thing matters, and nudges you toward a final judgment.” Well, then.
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