Viewers tuning in to Last Week Tonight this Sunday June 30th hoping to see what John Oliver has to say about Thursday’s debate are in for a disappointment.
Oliver and team are on the show’s traditional early summer break, and won’t return with new episodes until July 21st.
There is some good news on the Oliver front, however. At 11pm ET Sunday, another full season’s worth of the show’s older episodes will be made available for free on YouTube.
It was back in April that Last Week Tonight released its entire first season on YouTube, marking the first time that complete episodes of the show had been made available for viewing in the U.S. anywhere other than HBO and its sister streaming service Max. At the time, the show said that seasons 2-8 would follow, each week the show takes a week off this season. (Those hoping to watch full episodes from the show’s most recent three seasons will still need a Max subscription here in the U.S.)
This week’s batch of 30 episodes date back to the show’s third season.
Among the season’s most notable episodes was episode 14, which focused on the U.S. debt-buying industry, the end of which saw Oliver buy almost $15 million in medical debt, which he then forgave for 9,000 Americans. Episode 3, “Donald Trump,” focused on then-candidate Trump, set a viewership record for HBO. It was this episode that popularized the idea that Donald Trump’s family name was likely once “Drumpf,” and that Trump himself has “short fingers.”
The season finale (episode 30), which aired the Sunday after Donald Trump’s defeat of Hilary Clinton, may have been the season’s most memorable episode. In it, a legion of people joined Oliver in his message for the end of the year: “F*ck you, 2016.”
A trailer for season that was posted to Last Week Tonight’s YouTube page Friday echoes the theme of the season finale:
We know it might be the worst possible time to say this, but: it’s time to go back to 2016. Because unfortunately, Season 3 premieres on YouTube this Sunday, June 30th! Sorry! Sorry. Hey, we're sorry. pic.twitter.com/KON7KhhVtR
— Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight) June 28, 2024
In an accompanying message on X/Twitter, the show wrote: “We know it might be the worst possible time to say this, but: it’s time to go back to 2016. Because unfortunately, Season 3 premieres on YouTube this Sunday, June 30th! Sorry! Sorry. Hey, we’re sorry.”
Season 3 earned Last Week Tonight eight Emmy Award nominations and four wins, for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series, Outstanding Interactive Program, and Outstanding Picture Editing For Variety Programming.
