John Oliver cannot simply be goaded into one of his infamous, blistering hot takes—but when the entity begging to be roasted is your parent company, the urge is hard to resist on many levels. Warner Bros. Discovery has made the many memes about its streaming service name change into part of the re-rebranding process (the un-branding process?), an attempt to communicate, “We know we goofed, but we’re in on the joke!” WBD streaming marketing chief Shauna Spenley even publicly welcomed Oliver’s response at the studio’s upfronts presentation: “We just cannot wait for his hot take on this whole rebrand. We think it’s going to be pretty hot,” she said (via Variety).
Being directed by the bosses to dunk on them no doubt confused Oliver’s rebellious nature, yet dunk he did. Noting in his Last Week Tonight political coverage that a lot of people out there still call it “The Gulf of Mexico” rather than Donald Trump’s preferred “Gulf Of America,” the host observed that “it can take time for people to adjust to a stupid name change.” Summoning a graphic with the streaming service’s many different monikers, he said, “Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can even get used to one dumb name [HBO Go], some genius comes along and only makes it dumber [HBO Now], then somehow it gets dumber still [HBO Max], and then against all the odds, somehow it becomes even worse [Max], before inexplicably going back to the stupid thing it was before [HBO Max].”
As for WBD’s very “cool parent” expectations of its very prickly child Last Week Tonight, Oliver acknowledged that WBD was waiting for something “pretty hot” from him, “so please look me in the eyes when I say this: Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do. I’m not gonna do it if you want it unless, wait, hold on, maybe you thought baiting me like that would be a good way to stop me from doing it, but on the other hand, how can a company be that smart when they’re the same people that came up with so many stupid fucking names?”
Rather than be checkmated in this complicated game of four-dimensional how-to-appropriately-bite-the-corporate-hand-that-feeds-you chess, Oliver deferred the rest of the dunking to local news outlets. In the “And Now This” segment, Last Week Tonight shared clips of various newscasters throwing up their hands in disbelief and outright laughing at the Max to HBO Max change. Commentary variously includes: “Pick a thing, man! Pick a lane and stick with it! … My Lord, what are you doing Warner Bros.?” And: “Some new marketing guy needed to justify his job.” And also, perhaps most importantly: “If you really want to get upset, just stop and think about the collective salaries of the people who sat around the table and came up with the decision.”
John Oliver, meanwhile, would rather spend his time talking about other studios and networks, like CBS, which seems to be capitulating to Trump’s demands for more favorable coverage in order to push through a merger at its own parent company Paramount, or ABC, which is also facing scrutiny from Trump over its news coverage and, separately, hasn’t yet renewed the soapy procedural Doctor Odyssey starring Joshua Jackson. “A free press is a lot like Doctor Odyssey,” Oliver waxed poetic. “It’s rare, it’s special, we’re very lucky to have it, and if we’re not extremely careful we’re all gonna miss it terribly when it’s gone.” You can check out the full segment from the episode above.
