HBO’s Last Week Tonight returned to our screens on Sunday, with the launch of its “lucky 13th season.” And if you thought that John Oliver would not slip in a dig at the ever-looming sale of HBO parent Warner Bros. Discovery and the multiple interested suitors, you’d be mistaken.
The focus of Last Week Tonight‘s season opener—its first new episode in three very long, headline-filled months—was ICE’s aggressive policing tactics in cities such as Minneapolis, and the fatal shootings at the hands of federal agents.
Along the way, Oliver showed us the hot mess that was the Homeland Security org chart coming out of 9/11, and how any one federal agent could in essence be reporting to “100 people,” as 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas H. Kean put it.
“It’s crazy because it makes no sense,” Kean said in a clip from the 2014 documentary Homeland Confusion. “You could not do your job under those circumstances.”
Oliver from his desk jumped in to concur that “having an endless cavalcade of rapidly changing bosses would clearly be a distraction.
“Though I’ve got to say,” he continued—as the Warner Bros. Discovery logo appeared over his right shoulder—”you eventually get used to it!”
Commenting on the still-pending sale of WBD to probably Netflix, though Paramount keeps finessing its own bid, Oliver quipped, “I don’t even know which of these companies is going to be my new business daddy yet.”
With a nod to the Broadway musical about a girl and her three possible dads, he said, “It’s like a Mamma Mia! situation. Except less fun, and way less sexy.”
Oliver then set out to make things right with one of his possible new business daddies.
“Incidentally, if it is Netflix, sorry for all the times I called your catalogue a ‘Who’s Who of Who The F*ck Is This,'” he offered.
“Loved the ending of Stranger Things, by the way—very brown,” he added as multiple muddy screenshots populated the screen.
Watch the segment below:
— LateNighter (@latenightercom) February 16, 2026
