At the beginning of this week, as he has most weeks since his show launched on HBO, in April, John Oliver started a conversation on the Internet. In a short clip posted online, Oliver mocks Web sites, namely the Huffington Post, for how it shares segments from his show. He cites the headlines of two such posts: “John Oliver Tears FIFA Apart, Calls It ‘Cartoonishly Evil’,” which included a clip of his extended takedown of international soccer’s governing body; and “Watch John Oliver Verbally Pants Dr. Oz,” which introduced Oliver’s segment criticizing Dr. Oz for endorsing specious health remedies. The target of Oliver’s rant is the click-grasping hyperbole of those verb phrases—and the list of offenders extends well beyond the Huffington Post. “The Internet does not know how to describe things anymore,” Oliver says, and, to prove the point by extending it to the furthest reaches of nonsense, proceeds to “literally destroy” a piñata.
The Huffington Post responded by posting the video under a more subdued headline: “John Oliver Hit A Piñata With A Stick A Few Times... See How Boring That Sounds?” Other sites, including Vox and Gawker, noted Oliver’s admonishment by sticking, in this case, to the mere facts, and shared the video based on his instructions. The Internet would do better from now on. Oliver had won the round by being sharp and funny, and by gleefully snapping at one of the hands that feeds him: his show’s very virality.
The key to this episode is that these sites shared the very clip that mocked them—as they do with many of the other clips of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” It was an honor, in a way, to be mentioned—the kind of insidery thing that everyone on the inside enjoys being a part of. Earlier this summer, when Oliver devoted a long segment to the insidiousness of so-called “native advertising” on news sites, the video of that critique got embedded and shared widely by those same news sites. (Though not everywhere: BuzzFeed, for example, did not share the clip, in which Oliver says of the C.E.O., Jonah Peretti,"His face is like BuzzFeed itself: successful, appealing, and yet somehow you want to punch it.”) In this latest bit, Oliver notes the coziness of the relationship between his show and the places that run his clips: “I’m premium cable’s John Oliver, although, if you don’t read Internet news sites, you probably know me as ‘Oh, he has a show now. Really?’ ”
If you do read Internet news sites, you would see that Oliver has very quickly become an essential cultural critic, one whose bitterly funny opinion segments on such issues as capital punishment, net neutrality, and payday loans not only respond cleverly to the news but have had a hand in shaping both opinion, and, in the case of net neutrality, perhaps even policy. When the show débuted, I thought that its once-a-week schedule would prevent it from engaging with the ups and downs of the week’s news. (Oliver, in the show’s promotional advertisements, made note of this very limitation and, indeed, HBO executives have suggested that the show may expand, either to an hourlong weekly episode or to several half-hour shows during the week.) Instead, the show’s writers have had time to craft what is often the tightest, most joke-filled possible version of “The Daily Show,” where Oliver worked for seven years as a writer and correspondent.
The show’s time slot, on Sunday night, with clips released on Monday morning, has made it an ideal table-setter for the Internet, giving writers and editors looking for ideas and content a natural place to start their week. HBO has been particularly liberal in its release of clips, providing the show, or parts of it, at least, an audience, and thus a cultural reach, that goes well beyond the network’s subscribers. Oliver’s show thrives within a wider dialogue, and would have less relevance if only HBO’s subscribers were seeing it.
The current situation is, then, of supposedly mutual benefit: the show gets wide exposure and HBO gets to advertise by showing off one of its most shareable, relevant shows. News sites, meanwhile, get to briefly explain an essentially self-explanatory comedy video and reap the traffic rewards. (And, to be fair, this post begins in much the same way.) Of the two parties, it is Oliver who seems to have seized the upper hand, or else to realize that he has had it all along: he gets to mock the sites that, in effect, host his show, because the cost of not sharing has been judged as too high to pass up. And Oliver stays just on the friendly side of the line: he’s not telling the Huffington Post et al to stop sharing his clips every Monday, but rather needling them for doing it so eagerly.
Virality is a new metric of success among late-night shows, and perhaps the most important one. The “Tonight Show," with Jimmy Fallon, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” have mastered the art—mostly by doing charming, gently offbeat bits with celebrities, who prove themselves to be tremendous good sports—just how we’ve always hoped they’d be. I’ve seen dozens of clips from both shows—Fallon and Bruce Springsteen singing about Chris Christie; celebrities on "Kimmel" reading mean tweets about themselves. But does that make me a “viewer” of these shows, or even, in the older sense, a fan? Or am I just a consumer, and sometimes a perpetuator, via Twitter and Facebook, in a wider, Internet-delivery service? I can’t remember the last time that I watched a late-night show from start to finish on television.
This week, when I wanted to see David Letterman’s memorial to Robin Williams, I Googled it, and then watched it as an embedded YouTube post on the Hollywood Reporter’s Web site. Today, when I was reminded that Jon Stewart had returned from vacation, and so had offered his belated opinion on the events in Ferguson, Missouri, I got the clip at Talking Points Memo, which embedded a video hosted by Comedy Central. It was owing to the quality of the headlines, among other S.E.O. dark arts, that these sites showed up high on the search page and got my click, while others didn’t. I wanted to watch these clips, and this was the fastest way to get them: modern service journalism at its finest. Still, Oliver is right that it’s silly when a site proclaims that he “demolished,” “slammed,” or “eviscerated” something, when all he did was tell a joke about it. More than that, it may be unnecessary: the Huffington Post worried that its “John Oliver Hit A Piñata With A Stick A Few Times ” headline was boring, but it still appeared near the top on Google, as it had all the right keywords.
If, as he has noted of himself, Oliver is currently more of an Internet star than a traditional television one, well that might not really matter anymore—at least not for his fans. It might matter, however, to HBO. The company’s business model is based on gaining paying customers, and it is normally very stingy about what it releases for free. If giving Oliver to the world is merely an advertising tool for the network more generally—a way to engage with new potential subscribers—then it might continue making good bits of the show free online each week. But, in June, when the television critic Alan Sepinwall asked HBO’s chief marketing officer about the Oliver strategy, she emphasized that putting the clips on YouTube was its way of promoting the new show. Sepinwall cited sources at the network who said the practice might be temporary, and that “Last Week Tonight” may join “Game of Thrones,” and the rest of the network’s offerings, trapped on your father’s HBO GO account. If so, news sites will be left with the lousy task of merely describing a comedy sketch. John Oliver said something really hilarious last night … but I guess you had to see it.
