Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (often abridged as Last Week Tonight) is an American news satire late-night talk show hosted by John Oliver. It airs every Sunday and runs from February to November on HBO in the United States.

Last Week Tonight discusses news stories, current events, public figures, and organizations. Each episode's main segment covers one political or social issue in length, even if it may not have received recent news coverage. Alongside satire, the show uses self-referential humor, black comedy and observational comedy, and has been noted for its informative and fact-based content.

Last Week Tonight premiered in April 2014 and adopted its current broadcast schedule from its second season. The show has since become the fifth-longest running program on HBO, and was renewed for a thirteenth season, which began airing from February 2026. In July 2026, it was renewed for a fourteenth season, scheduled to air in 2027.

Production Oliver described his preparations for the show in an interview for The Wire: "... I basically have to watch everything. The only thing I kind of watch for pleasure is Fareed Zakaria's show on Sundays ... That and 60 Minutes I watch for pleasure, or maybe Frontline ... I have a TV on in my office all the time and I'll generally flick around on that from CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Al Jazeera ... I'm watching with a certain thing in mind and that is how to see a story told badly."

He said to another interviewer that he is concerned about dealing with old news:

If something happens on a Monday, realistically all the meat is going to be picked off that bone by the time it gets to us – there's probably barely a point in doing it ... I think we'll be attracted to some extent by stories that are off the grid ... Our show may end up skewing more international in terms of stories.

Tim Carvell, executive producer of Last Week Tonight, explained in an interview how the cast and crew deal with a half hour of Oliver speaking without any commercial breaks.

Carvell also revealed that HBO gave them freedom in choosing guests for the show, advising them not to feel obligated to feature celebrities. When asked by an interviewer about "correspondents" such as those featured on The Daily Show, Oliver replied, "we're not going to be a parody news show, so no people pretending to be journalists."

In early March 2020, the show went on temporary hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The show returned on March 29, 2020, being filmed in Oliver's home with no studio audience due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and produced largely by virtual communication. The show remained there until it resumed filming, in a new studio, in September 2021. While filming from his home, Oliver had the background replaced with a textured bluish background. He eventually personified the background, calling it "The Void" and adding to the background cartoon eyes and a mouth. Oliver would occasionally interact with "The Void", with H. Jon Benjamin voicing "The Void".

Oliver has stated that he has "full creative freedom, including free rein to criticize corporations", and frequently pokes fun at HBO's (now former) parent company AT&T, referring to it as the show's "business daddy".

Format Unlike The Daily Show, which comments on recent news, Oliver tends to explore one story in depth. The show is taped in front of a studio audience, and HBO offers a limited number of free tickets to attend each week's Last Week Tonight taping.

The show's title sequence presents images relating to the world at large with satirical captions written in dog Latin (e.g., a photo of a gun labelled "deus ex machina", a picture of Vladimir Putin labelled "POTUS Operandi", a photo of Oliver himself labelled "hostus mostus"). Each episode contains a small handful of shorter segments and then one main segment. While the short segments almost always relate to recent news, the episode's main segment usually covers in length and detail a political issue, even if that issue did not have news media attention during the preceding week. On occasion, the short segments are omitted and the main segment takes up the entirety of the episode. Some of the episodes will follow up the main segment with another video compilation or news story. Oliver's speech is broken up with video compilations of recent news clips, or recurring segments, into which Oliver segues by saying, "And now, this." Oliver has also ended some segments with mock trailers for fictional TV shows or commercials that satirize the subject of his speech.

Oliver injects humor into his presentation, including satirical analogies and allusions to popular culture and celebrities. The show includes a panel in the upper-left corner that frequently displays a photo or graphic that accompanies the subject at hand, as a comedic aid. A full-screen graphic will show and play a video clip (such as excerpts from news show or documentaries) when Oliver is citing it. He often coins hashtags related to his segment for use in social media, some of which go viral.

A recurring element of the show is Oliver's use of mascots. The mascots used in the show include Jeff the Diseased Lung in a Cowboy Hat, Hoots the NSA Owl, Taryn the Tinder Chicken, and the Last Week Tonight puppets. Oliver told Vulture in February 2019 that "[Executive producer] Tim Carvell and I – I think we've always seen the show as our attempt to make The Muppet Show and failing to do so. But occasionally, just occasionally, you get the kind of Muppet Show adoration in the ludicrous mascots."

The show frequently features one or more celebrity guests in its segments to help Oliver better get his point on the week's topic across. Guests have featured in many different capacities including giving monologues directly to camera, being interviewed by Oliver, playing musical numbers, participating in comedic skits with or without Oliver, or starring in fictitious parody PSAs. On the show, guests are sometimes seen in the Last Week Tonight studio itself doing their part during the show's main taping, while at other times they are seen in video clips that were pre-recorded at a different location and later included in the show.

Oliver has interviewed personalities who were directly involved in or impacted by the issues being discussed in the show to get their first-hand experiences and viewpoints on the issue, such as Pepe Julian Onziema, Edward Snowden, the Dalai Lama, Anita Hill, Stephen Hawking, and Monica Lewinsky. Oliver traveled to Moscow to interview Snowden, and traveled to Dharamsala, India to interview the 14th Dalai Lama.

Purpose

While broadly within the categories of political satire and late-night talk shows, Last Week Tonight has taken a more specific approach to deeper dives into systemic issues which intend to illustrate both the wider socio-political context and the complex interconnections and embeddedness of public policies in social outcomes.

International broadcasting

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver episode clips can be seen internationally on YouTube. It is broadcast on premium channel HBO Canada that is simulcast with HBO in the U.S.; around the same time it is shown on the international HBO channels. It airs in Australia on the Foxtel channel FOX8 and the streaming service Binge and airs in New Zealand on SoHo. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is broadcast on Mondays on Sky One. In Belgium, it is broadcast on Thursdays by the Telenet cable-only channel PRIME Series. It airs in South Africa on M-Net and in Portugal on RTP3. In India, the show is streamed on Disney+ Hotstar, before it was relocated to JioCinema. In Greece, the show airs on Cosmote TV's Cosmote Series HD.

Social media Oliver often makes use of joke hashtags to facilitate the viral spread of his videos on Twitter and Facebook, as with the hashtag #NotMyChristian, which he used in 2014 to complain about the casting of actor Jamie Dornan as Christian Grey in the feature film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. The hashtag became a recurring punchline on the show, mentioned in both serious stories and casual segues.

YouTube channel Last Week Tonight has a YouTube channel where video segments of the show are added after the show has aired. Prior to Season 11, the main segment from each episode was posted on Monday, the day following the original Sunday airings on HBO. In Season 11, the main segment was uploaded on the Thursday following the original Sunday airing. Oliver has publicly expressed frustration with HBO's decision to delay the release to the YouTube channel by three additional days. By the next season, the show returned to uploading the main segment to its YouTube channel on the following day.

Some extended clips are also available on the show's YouTube channel, as are "Web Exclusives" that are produced solely for the channel, such as a July 2016 video in which Oliver responded to negative comments left on the channel itself.

On February 25, 2024, the show announced that it will be uploading full episodes of the show to its YouTube channel for free in countries and territories where the show does not have exclusive broadcast rights from local broadcasters. The upload is done a few hours after broadcast. The show has also uploaded past full episode archives from the previous ten seasons, also to the same aforementioned countries. These changes do not affect availability on Max, which retains episodes on their platform for a year after their original broadcast before being removed. On April 26, 2024, the show announced that they would be making the entirety of seasons 1 through 8 available on their YouTube channel in the United States, starting with season 1 the following Sunday and continuing with seasons 2 through 8 during the following weeks whenever the show was off.

A YouTube video of a segment on the show supporting the UK remaining in the EU was found to be the single most shared video clip on Twitter during the run-up to the 2016 EU membership referendum.

The show's production has also created content specifically for fan use. For the March 19, 2017, episode, which reported on Bolivia's growing coalition of workers clad in zebra suits to educate civilians about traffic laws, the show's production recorded 23 minutes of a person in a zebra costume dancing and gesticulating before a green screen so that viewers could edit it into other videos for humorous effect. A similar video called "Real Animals, Fake Paws" for use in reenacting U.S. Supreme Court cases was released after the October 19, 2014, episode where dogs were used instead of justices to make listening to oral court cases more amusing to the general public and to increase interest in the subject.

By April 2015, the channel had attained over a million subscribers. That number had risen to over 5 million by May 2017. , the channel has over 10 million subscribers and more than 4.5 billion views.

Renewals Oliver's initial contract with HBO was for two years with an option for extension. In September 2020, HBO announced that the show had been renewed for three additional seasons of 30 episodes each, keeping the show on the air through 2023. The show's tenth season was impacted by the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike, with no shows airing from May through September, reducing the number of episodes for the season from the typical 30 down to 21. On December 5, 2023, HBO announced that the show had been renewed for three additional seasons, keeping the show on the air through 2026. The show's twelfth season premiered on February 16, 2025.

The thirteenth season was announced on February 2, 2026. It premiered on February 15, 2026. Oliver extended his contract with HBO by one year in July 2026, renewing the series for a fourteenth season.

Episodes

Reception Audience viewership