John Oliver preps viewers for Luigi Mangione's sentencing by eviscerating UnitedHealth Group

Of course, Oliver stated up front, he is in no way excusing the actions of confessed murderer Luigi Mangione, the distractingly hot assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death as an act of protest against his parent company’s predatory practices. However, Oliver did reveal that a poll showed that nearly as many Americans blamed UnitedHealth Group’s denial of necessary care for the murder as the guy who pulled the trigger. So a little probing of the healthcare behemoth’s practices seems in order. 

In his marathon of exasperated revelations (UnitedHealth’s “vertical integration” makes lucrative self-dealing the norm), tearful interview clips (a young man died after UnitedHealth whimsically raised his asthma inhaler from $60 to $500), and Oliver’s signature razor-sharp asides (Thomson’s murder represents “the ultimate Yelp review”), the tale of greed and murderous corporate indifference makes for a whiplash-inducing emotional watch. 

Toss in one of Oliver’s virtuoso digressions—this time a metaphor about unqualified executives and algorithms making medical decisions transformed to a lyrical lament about an elderly nun’s one, long-ago same-sex love–and you’ve got Last Week Tonight in a nutshell: Informative, incendiary and improbably hilarious.