Just curious if anyone would like to do an ongoing discussion thread of old episodes of Last Week Tonight, since they are releasing all the old seasons on youtube in their entirety? I watched the first couple and thought it would be an interesting insight into the past decade of both national and global politics and how we got where we are today?
Thoughts?
Okay… well a few folks seem interested, so here we go… I’ll post the youtube link here for each episode and then we can talk about it whenever people get around to watch it…
Season 1, Episode 1:
I’ll give it a day or so for folks to watch… But think of this as a primary source. So, from me a couple of questions:
Of course, comedic takes on news was/is hardly new, but is there something different about the approach that Oliver takes here? Can you see the influence of the Daily Show?
What about the topics he decides to tackle? What do you think that says about the direction the show will take? What of the topics have relevance now?
Feel free to add your own questions both prior to watching and after watching?
I think all the elements of the show today are there from that first episode. They had the humorous recap of the week’s news, followed by a couple of more in depth looks at an issue. Maybe not quite as in depth as today. I think today, they typically focus on just one issue to dig deep on each episode. One thing that stood out was the Colbert-esque fake-ish interview with the NSA guy. I don’t know when Oliver abandoned that, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t do that anymore.
I think what sets this show off, from this very first episode, from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report is a clear attempt to treat the subjects more seriously. I mean, obviously there’s humor throughout, but it feels more journalistic. I think the Daily Show is now trying to do that, too, and has been since Trevor Noah replaced Stewart. But Oliver, I think, was the first to accept and embrace that it’s not just a comedic look at the news. That they can do actual journalism, too.
ETA: Stewart was doing some actual journalism too, before Trevor Noah took over, but he refused to admit and accept that. He continually insisted that they were just a comedy show. I think that’s the difference here.
It’s trippy watching old eps:
John looks sooo young, and the country hadn’t yet descended into a constant carousel of batshit crazy.
It seems like a lifetime ago.
I am down to discuss more recent eps, whenever you’re ready to post them; I don’t think I can revisit most old eps, as it triggers this weird sense of melancholy for me.
unrelated to this thread, mum and i watched an old episode the other night (S1E2, i think. it was about corn) and i think i got that sense of melancholy you describe.
i had to keep reminding myself, “this is before tRump. what a difference. everything has changed.”
It’s nice that Johnny Hollywood got a job after The Love Guru.
Hmmm… that’s a good idea? We could intersperse old and new for discussion? Post the new when it’s posted and then older episodes after?
Sounds like a great idea!
That’s from 2004.
Okay… but I wasn’t really thinking of this as a general John Oliver thread, but as about Last Week Tonight specifically, since he focuses on the news primarily there and since he’s been on for a decade now, and they’re putting up the whole series by season, I thought I might be a good way to delve into how we got to where we are now… 
Yeah, that to me strikes me as some influence from the Daily show…
True, but I think he’s gotten more seriously as… waves arms wildly… stuff gotten more serious.
Agreed on that! Again, I think it’s a byproduct of how serious shit has gotten in the world. Both shows do a good job of walking that line between humor and serious discussion.
But in general, I’m kind of wondering what the rise of shows like this are saying about the state of journalism. Of course, when they started the Daily Show, the goal was probably just satire (starting with Craig Kilborn). Stewart certainly brought in some serious discussions on the failures of TV journalism across his tenure as the big guy in the chair… But…
I think so too, yeah…
Some thoughts on the contents of the first episode: Racism of old white dudes was up first. Sterling and Bundy, both of whom are still around, and it’s interesting to see how Oliver takes the casual racism a bit less seriously than he might now? I mean, he’s clearly pointing it out for a reason, but it’s a bit dismissive? Maybe that’s not the right word, but… more like a “haha, look at those weird old racists dudes that no one takes seriously”… I remember Sterling getting a lot of shit for his comments, but we see how the media not taking racism seriously enough has done a great deal of damage. Bundy’s sons of course later attempted takeover of the park out in Oregon… So, that family had been in the news for a while by the time that happened. And journalists took them seriously, despite the absolutely problematic nature of their ideology and actions. Bothsiderism at play…
Got to love the appearance of Lisa Loeb! 
I do appreciate him going after Oregon for their failures with their version of the healthcare exchange. Shows a willingness to go after “both sides” rather than just taking one political perspective (though he’s certainly coming from a progressive POV). That Lisa Loeb song was savage tho… 
Then he gets into the Indian elections, which turned out to be pivotal. I appreciate that he took American media to task for ignoring the elections while hyping up an election that was more than 900 days away at that point! Got to love the McLaughlin appearance… obligatory…
But I don’t know that anyone in the US (outside of Indian-Americans and/or those who study India) was really paying attention to the rise of Hindutva, and that’s has incredibly serious repercussions for Muslim Indians and activists who believe in a secular state there. It strikes me that it’s part of a larger trend of people rejecting modernity and embracing a mythical version of their religion’s past. And then he takes western media to task for focusing on a leopard attack, which sort of is one of those orientalizing moments… “so exotic, they get attacked by LEOPARDS”! And last, he’s also focused on how the changes happening to the western media is now being exported to other countries (I guess that’s from the UK, US, and Australia to the rest of the world, given that Fox is the model being followed by right wingers globally?).
I appreciate that he’s able to unpack some serious shit about US empire, without directly calling it American empire… we treat foreign states/peoples as “exotic” as opposed to taking them seriously as modern states that represent different cultures.
Also, I remember how popular pomegranate juice was in the mid-2010s! SAVE THE PROSTATES!!! But it’s the first amendment and food labeling… But I noticed that now, he has a tendency to offer solutions to problems. But here, he’s giving people a cultural jamming project (stickers - I wonder how many people did that). They still do that, but it’s more about him doing things to challenge the establishment?
Cheerleaders in pro-hand-egg… I assume they’re still getting screwed over… 
And then you mentioned the NSA interview above. As I said, that feels like a holdover from the Daily Show? Still effective, me thinks. He certainly manages to call him on the shit the NSA guy is saying, like about the metadata and the problems with individual agents exploiting their power. I like the idea of Mr. Tiggles, tho…
Also, he’s a baby! So young, and not even American at the time!
I agree about how they do things more in-depth and they’ve started offering solutions at the end of the longer in-depth segments, too…
Agreed, and he’s pushed it even further by interacting and instigating with the subjects of that journalism. Look at what he did with Clarence Thomas - he didn’t just report on Thomas’ corruption, he actually made a legitimate offer to pay him off to leave the court.
Whew, that CoverOregon segment was pretty brutal! Especially since the whole scandal can essentially be summed up as: Oracle defrauded the state by promising a functioning website, failied to deliver, and got a slap on the wrist for it.
The fair part of the reporting is that, yes, we live in a cartoon paradise.
And here is the most recent LWT (or at least the part they post on youtube) about corn…
Look at that old guy, beaten down by life… 
Watching this for a second time, it strikes me that a major theme he’s sort of implying, but not entirely pulling out is the disconnect between our national narratives (that America is still a largely agrarian society with the farmers being the salt of the earth that are feeding us all, and much of the world) and reality (that most of the corn grown are not for us or anyone to eat, but for other purposes, and the farmer-centric narrative is very distoring). From the part with the comments of Wes Jackson early on in the video… I think he shows up later, too.
And with the appearance of Earl “Rusty” Butz, we see once again how the Nixon administration had been a key player in changes to our system (no longer paying farmers to keep their yields low)… new policy of expansion from the 1973 farm bill, which is still official policy, which is benefiting the larger producers more than small farmers.
Strikes me that Nixon’s administration leaned hard into neo-liberalism, while also holding onto just enough of the liberal consensus to keep wider national support. But it was here we can see his policies putting thumbs on the scale for (in this case) large producers of grain. Where Nixon crawled, of course, Reagan ran.
Okay… the bit about the plastic bag over the journalists head talking about the lack of oxygen in the Chesapeake by during the summer because of run offs… and then Oliver riffs on that, to me, that seems like he’s gotten much darker over the years in his jokes? 
Probably says something about how dark the world is getting lately… Also, 10 years of “thinking about the negatives” as he said later on after the ethanol stuff might have something to do with it!
And our current form of industrial farming and corn subsidizes has caused erosion and dust storms, so apparently we learned nothing from the dust bowl era…
Ignoring the the pearl harbor weirdness (which is hilariously weird and probably worth a few pages of comments all on its own), but the additives of ethanol into gas. That weird guy happy about Pearl Harbor, Al Mavis (Il. dept of ag), pointed out that it was going to help with the lead in gas problem (which as we all know was a major environmental problem), but it’s caused its own environmental problems as Oliver pointed out with the dead zones and dust storms, etc.
A recent episode about the cattle industry highlighted why family owned ranches were being pushed out of business and how monopolistic the US food supply has become. Most outlets don’t cover it at all except maybe in discussions about greedflation. The impact of corn production and policies in particular are much worse than I ever imagined, though. 
For a while, the concept of feed corn was troubling to me. It just seemed unnatural, unless pigs or cows have been secretly picking and shucking corn to eat it instead of grass or other plants. Overproducing any crop and then trying to find ways to monetize it by adding it to the diets of animals and people always seemed sus…and Big Corn has done a much better job than the cranberry salesman:
What’s worse about agribusiness is that the pollution problems scale along with the rise of factory farms. In addition to the Chesapeake water pollution (and I agree that part was surprisingly dark), poultry farms are another major source of pollution. Maybe that darkness comes from revisiting the history of how we got here. These problems were decades in the making, but we can’t afford to take decades to resolve them. Even worse, John Oliver is presenting us with flashbacks on some topics that haven’t improved since he presented them the first time. It must be difficult not to react like this:
Second episode from season 1…
SANCTIONS!!! Did they fix all the things? No! That just resulted in a LARGER invasion later on!!!
Correspondants dinner? Mocked! Very illustrative of the cosines of the media with the Washington establishment. But as we all know, power corrupts.
Okay, I think this is where they start to set the tone for how the show is going to go here with their delving into the Death Penalty. Also… ANGELA!!! Joe Biden joke…
I love how he bribes the audience with a hamster video.
I think he’s jokes have gotten a bit sharper…
He’s done a great job here breaking down why the death penalty is a huge problem and is fundamentally unjust in how it actually functions. And he manages to do it in a way that isn’t… partisan? Because he brings up a number of reasons why it’s a problem… and this is of course highly relevant because of Trump’s position on the death penalty.
Hamsters eating tiny burritos!!!
The Brunei bit is interesting, a discussion our government’s hypocrisy with regards to things like LGBQT+ rights when it’s a country sitting on a bunch of oil… And Ellen being the one calling others out for being an asshole… That’s not aged well!
But it’s the Ukraine bit that bears focus, given where that has gone since the larger invasion. But it’s a bit of a throw away set of jokes?
That episode, to me, felt like the current show, for the most part. More so than the first episode anyway. They really got the formula dialed in quickly. And yeah, the Ukraine bit made me go, “Wow.” He really nailed it with the criticism of the sanctions, because it’s crystal clear now that those did absolutely nothing. Not that we should be declaring war and skipping past less brutal tactics, but we should probably rethink the efficacy of sanctions in general.
Yeah, it could be anything from better targeting of sanctions, to figuring out ways to get more countries on board with them…
The early sanctions were insufficient, but the extended sanctions have hit Russia hard. They have clearly been effective at minimizing resources that Russia could apply to the invasion. The sanctions have arguably been as critical to support Ukraine as arms supply.
