John Oliver Talks ‘Last Week Tonight’ Season 9, Sponsoring Marble League, and Adam Driver’s Oscar Snubs

When Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Season 9 premiered on HBO last night, it marked a return to sort-of normalcy for the show. Host John Oliver was officially out of the lonely white void and back in the studio. While Last Week Tonight had already returned to studio for the last batch of Season 8 episodes, Season 9 makes the move back official. And with the move, Oliver teases that Last Week Tonight can get back to being silly. “We’re just looking forward to doing spectacularly stupid things again and executing stupidity to a ludicrous degree,” Oliver told Decider.

“Criminally misusing HBO’s resources feels like the point of doing this show,” Oliver said. “And I am very much looking forward to doing things that will make HBO’s production department say, ‘What did they just do and how much did that just cost?’ And then never telling them.”

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver first premiered on HBO in April 2014, has taken a vise-like grip over the world of late night comedy ever since. The critically-acclaimed show shook up the late night format by committing to long, heavily-researched segments often focusing on a poorly understood subject. Over the years, Oliver has dug into such topics as the corruption in debt collecting, the tobacco industry, televangelists, and — in early 2020 — the swiftly moving Coronavirus pandemic. However Oliver and his writers manage to balance the horror of their deep dives with moments of sheer absurdity. Last Week Tonight has done everything from buying Russell Crowe’s jockstrap to sponsoring marble racing. The result? A unique cocktail of news and comedy that’s netted the show and its staff 23 Emmys, two Peabodys, four TCA awards, and a long list of other honors and nominations.

Decider spoke with John Oliver back on February 8 about what fans can expect from Last Week Tonight Season 9. He describes the unforeseen challenges of writing comedy over Zoom — “The writer’s room is still empty. It’s still like those shots at Chernobyl; it’s a lot like teddy bears tipped over to the side” — and why the show isn’t sponsoring marble racing anymore…

DECIDER: So I have sort of a silly question to ask you first. I was a huge fan back in 2020 of Jelle’s Marble Runs. And I really enjoyed that you guys were the sole sponsor of the 2020 Marble League. I noticed that I didn’t see Last Week Tonight at any of their later sporting events. What happened there? Was there something that caused maybe a falling out with Jelle’s Marble Runs?

JOHN OLIVER: [laughing] No.

Could you be back for Marble League 2022?

No, nothing bad happened there at all. We sponsored that one season and we were very anxious that we didn’t change anything about what they were doing. When we first reached out to them to sponsor them they said, “I don’t know if you’re about to ask us to give you your own marble. There’s quite a fierce fanbase here. I don’t know that they would like having another marble introduced.”

And we said to them, “We don’t want you to change anything. We just want to give you the money so you can keep doing this. That is literally it. There is nothing else we want. You want to put up a sign that’d be lovely. Otherwise, we want nothing to do with changing the format of this event.” Which is perfect. So no. Absolutely, nothing. Nothing happened negatively between us. We absolutely loved sponsoring it. It felt like a joke for us, the big happy joke of sponsoring it. Once that was over someone else should pick it up and run with it.

We were really happy to be associated with it and I love what they do. Before the pandemic what they were doing was fantastic and during the pandemic it was just flat out wonderful to watch.

Do you have a team?

You know what? I actually didn’t. Because that’s the thing if you don’t have a personal connection to a team, if the team is not from the city you are from, or doesn’t have friends or family you actually get to choose. It’s not like choosing the Yankees and then I realize, “Oh there are some Yankee marbles here.” You know if you chose the orange marble there are going to be some angry fan bases here and you need to reckon with that. So I didn’t. I was purely a fan from the outside.

Alright, so going into Last Week Tonight Season 9… What going into this year makes it feel special? Is there anything thematic that you maybe expect? Are there topics that you’re excited to share with the audience? What’s new?

It’s a good question and I guess what’s new is really the idea that we’re going to get to do this in the studio again. Because for over eighteen months we were doing it out of just a white room. Basically an apartment in New York. And we were doing it in a very isolated way.

I was definitely isolated but also we all were. I still haven’t seen some of my staff since March 2020. So getting to go back to a studio for a handful of shows last year all of sudden we realized we could play with those toys again. We could drop teddy bears from the ceiling, we could roll out a duck painting, and we could shoot things again. We could have Danny DeVito in a PFAs ad. Or do a video on union busting. All of a sudden all these toys that we have not been able to play with we could pick up again.

And it’s a massive benefit to stories especially when they are complicated and dry to be able to do something fun at the end of them. It really does feel like you are giving someone a scoop of ice cream after the experience of a vegetable heavy dinner.

Yeah. I am curious about if there were any unforeseen challenges about going back? Was there anything that surprised you about getting back into the rhythm? I mean obviously you have all these boons to your storytelling, but you mentioned not everyone was there in person. Do you get the same kind of chemistry between the writers on Slack that you do in person?

It’s a great question because the thing I missed the most wasn’t having an audience. I kind of got used to that pretty quickly. Partly because I talk over the top of the audience’s response to our show because we don’t have time to slow down. So if anything I can actually go faster, we could actually fit more show when there’s literally no audience and it’s just me talking as fast as I can into a camera.

But in the development of the story, [having the writing staff in person] is absolutely a huge thing I missed. And what we would do pre-pandemic is that we would get a group of people into a room and we would just read the story out and play the clips. And you would get a sense. It’s not exactly working out more jokes, although that’s definitely helpful for that. But where it’s really massively beneficial is getting a sense of what parts of the story are interesting to people, what parts are confusing because we haven’t explained them too much, what parts are boring and you feel people disengage. It’s basically being able to judge the different degrees of silence.

There’s a difference between an engaged silence and a bored silence. And it really helps to get those differences early in the process. And it’s impossible to gauge that over Zoom. So what I actually miss the most was being able to read the story out to staff early on in the process with people there, not just into my laptop and having to rejoin a group chat going “What was that like?” “Did that make sense?” Because at no point have I had any barometer on how it’s going.

Speaking of how it’s going, you guys have had the Emmys on lockdown for six years now. Is that awkward? Do you just assume that every other award is in the bag?

[Laughs] No!

I’m just curious because I have friends who are staffed at other late night shows and when they get nominated I’m like, “Congratulations!” and they always say, “Oh, we already lost to Oliver.”

Oh, that makes me feel a bit sad to be honest. Because that’s where I start to have a problem with awards. It feels like you just can’t take awards, especially awards for comedy, too seriously. It just doesn’t matter. So yeah it’s very nice and I appreciate winning it. But the last thing I want is for anyone working at other shows to feel like their work is somehow diminished by not winning a shiny thing. At the end of the day you are an adult holding a trophy. Which is inherently ridiculous.

You mentioned during your speech at the last Emmys that you wished Conan had won that year. And what he meant to you. How many other people in this field do you look to and think, ‘Wow I’m inspired everyday by what they’re doing with their formats.”

Again, it’s not about awards because this should not be the thing that decides whether something is important or not. But for me it was actually seeing Conan there. That was the first time I had gone anywhere during the pandemic was the Emmys. So it’s a sort of weird first immersion into socializing. But that was my first realization of, “Oh shit! It is over.” That show and what that show meant to so many people working comedy, so many comedy writers were so deeply affected by his show over the years. As inspirationally stupid as it could be. It just felt like it needed to be acknowledged that this monumentally influential program was coming to an end in that form.

It was a big deal. You know Conan’s influence as a show will have a long tail in comedy. Just because writer’s rooms are just stocked with people for whom it was the greatest thing they had ever seen. And I still think in terms of how shows, how these kinds of late night shows have developed some of the things he did I think are still some of the boldest. When he did a show to an audience of children that was absolutely incredible. From the moment the camera bumps in and before you can even see the kids you can hear them. Oh my god that was incredible. I think he did one using claymation as well. What they were doing with that late night show was so experimental, so funny, and they were the beneficiary of really performing like no one was watching. Which is the liberating equivalent of dancing like nobody’s watching.

Today the Oscar nominations were announced. One person was snubbed in many categories: Adam Driver. Didn’t get a nomination for House of Gucci—

WHAT?!

The Last Duel, Annette…completely snubbed. How do you, as his biggest fan, feel about that?

I think even less of the Oscars than I thought of it before you told me that. There is a huge Adam Driver hole in the Oscars this year, and that hole is massive.

The new season of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver airs on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday nights at 11 p.m. ET/10c.

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