If John Oliver’s new jingle gets stuck in your head, he hopes it stops you from calling JG Wentworth.
The Last Week Tonight host closed out Sunday’s episode with a full-scale parody of the company’s famously inescapable “877-CASH-NOW” Viking ad—this time rewritten as a warning about the structured settlement factoring industry.
Oliver’s main story this week examined companies that buy the rights to future structured settlement payments in exchange for lump-sum cash payouts, often at steep discounts. After tracing the history of JG Wentworth’s ubiquitous commercials—and their pop-culture afterlife as an earworm on Curb Your Enthusiasm—Oliver argued that the ads obscure just how financially damaging those deals can be for people who take them.
“To try and inoculate you against their charms going forward,” Oliver said near the end of the episode, “we’ve actually made our own ad to give people a more accurate portrayal of the risks this entire industry poses.”
What followed was a Broadway-caliber anti-factoring Viking spectacular led by Tony winner James Monroe Iglehart and Smash star Megan Hilty, with a chorus of helmeted performers singing a new version of the JG Wentworth jingle.
“If you have a structured settlement and you’re watching TV,” Iglehart sang, “you might hear a song like this, so please listen to me.” The chorus then hammered home the counter-message: “They’ll take your money bit by bit until they’ve got it all.”
The fake ad also recruited a few familiar faces. Saturday Night Live alum Alex Moffat appeared as a confused customer suddenly realizing the deal he’d been talked into “is much worse than what it first appeared.” Victor Garber, playing the conductor, delivered the bluntest consumer-protection advice of the night: “It’s your money, don’t let these parasites get their f*cking hands on it.”
And because no JG Wentworth earworm tribute would be complete without him, Larry David showed up to bring the Curb connection full circle, belting the parody’s final warning: “They’ll bleed you ’til you’re dead!”
It was a fittingly elaborate capper to an episode built around one of TV advertising’s most aggressively memorable jingles. Oliver’s version may not make viewers want to pick up the phone—but odds are it’ll be stuck in their heads anyway.
Watch the show’s fake ad below. (We’ll update this post with the full segment when it’s posted online.)
