John Oliver’s Saturday Taping Leaves Last Week Tonight a Step Behind Breaking Iran News

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has always walked a tightrope between timeless analysis and real-time commentary. But the show’s Saturday-night taping schedule left it just out of step this weekend—missing the U.S. military’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by only a few hours.

In a post to the show’s Bluesky account late Saturday night, the Last Week Tonight team acknowledged the unfortunate timing:

“Earlier today we taped tomorrow’s show, and we discussed the potential for the U.S. to bomb Iran. Since taping, the U.S. has carried out several bombings. We’ll have more to say in the future, but for now our piece on Trump and the Iran Deal can help explain what got us here.”

The linked segment—which originally aired in April 2018—saw Oliver urging the Trump administration not to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, warning that such a move could trigger a destabilizing arms race in the region. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the agreement just over two weeks later.

Through its first six seasons, Last Week Tonight taped on Sundays. That changed during the pandemic, when the show shifted to Saturday tapings—a move that, unlike many other pandemic-era adjustments, never reversed.

This isn’t the first time a late-breaking Sunday headline has caught the show flat-footed. As we reported at the time, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race last July, Last Week Tonight responded shortly aftwards with a similarly sheepish social post:

“‘Hey, let’s switch our taping day to Saturday, no big news ever happens on a Sunday afternoon.’—some idiots.”

In that instance, executive producer Tim Carvell noted that the team had anticipated the possibility of Biden’s withdrawal. “Honestly, we tried to cover our bases,” he wrote in response to a Bluesky post. “If we taped today it’d only be around 2% different.”