The show discussed involves mature topics and language

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in its tenth season, is perhaps one of the best and funniest shows of its kind out there. It’s an ongoing news program available on HBO Max and partially on Youtube. Each episode follows a relatively strict format: every week on Sunday night, show host John Oliver presents a 5-10 minute recap of the previous week’s global events, from legislation, to war, to pop culture. After that, he presents a 20-30 minute long deep-dive into an important topic – we’ve seen segments about the Food and Drug Administration, transgender rights, prisons, cryptocurrency and, most recently, the surprisingly wealthy industry of dollar stores.

Let’s start with reporting. The show has an extremely dedicated team of researchers who do incredible journalistic work every week – they cite an extremely vast variety of sources throughout each episode, showing extreme thoroughness and thoughtfulness in their work. Throughout each piece, the Last Week Tonight writing team utilizes many different news outlets, interview clips, first-hand accounts, and so on. And they don’t just show you the sources, they provide extremely accurate, poignant commentary and analysis on the situation – just as it is accurate, it is moving and thought-provoking.

But another major draw of Last Week Tonight isn’t just its informativeness, it’s the humor – despite having relatively high-octane reporting, it is explicitly a comedy program. Its writing and presenting style is bland at first glance – just a guy talking into a camera for 30-45 minutes – but the minimality is there to make way for absolutely brilliant writing. There isn’t really another way to express it: Last Week Tonight is really, really funny. It’s witty, smart, creative and unique – the sort of rapid-fire, jam-packed, blisteringly intelligent and endlessly relatable comedic writing that’s so difficult to nail down consistently. And while you might expect humor in the context of heavy topics to be of poor taste, Last Week Tonight is constantly on the right side of the laughter – never punching down, never relying on shock-value, always remaining hilarious and self-aware. It’s obvious that the show knows when to joke, and just as importantly, when not to joke. Even when discussing topics as heated as the abortion or the Israel-Hamas War, Oliver and the writing team are endlessly entertaining while using comedy as an incredibly strong persuasive technique. Last Week Tonight is perfect evidence that humor is found alongside empathy, not despite it. 

This program provides the ever-necessary niche of joy in the face of dire circumstances, it is an absolute joy to watch and unbelievably educational about things you might not even think about. Their ability to deal with tonal dissonance is unparalleled, leading to some of the most emotionally engaging pieces of content in multiple ways. If you want to thoroughly and accurately learn about important socio-political topics, Last Week Tonight is for you. If you just want to kick back and laugh at something brilliantly written, Last Week Tonight is for you too. 

At its core, the show is very simple. In ways it might be formulaic, repetitious, and predictable, but its structure is ultimately an advantage. Every episode is densely packed with so much good stuff in so many different ways, and they use such a simple framework to emerge as an astounding and immensely valuable product. Between its immaculate reporting and amazing writing style, Last Week Tonight is a resounding 10/10.