Fans who worried that John Oliver's new HBO program might somehow diminish his legacy at The Daily Show can rest easy.
Because apparently he's decided to copy it.
That doesn't mean Sunday's debut of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver wasn't funny, because it was. Sitting behind an expansive desk with a city skyline at his back, Oliver uncorked a relentless load of telling barbs about the dysfunctional collision of media and politics, lambasting cable networks for speculating endlessly about 2016 presidential elections instead of covering the largest election in human history underway right now in India.
But it was also a half-hour of the wisecracks-on-news-coverage-made-to-look-like-a-newscast that The Daily Show has perfected.
We all knew Oliver was hired by HBO after his stellar stint filling in for Jon Stewart on The Daily Show last year. And in Last Week Tonight, it appears that HBO has pretty much bought that program, right down to the in-your-face pre-taped interviews guaranteed to make the subject look like an uneasy participant in a joke where they're not quite sure of the punch line.