Revisit our 2014 cover story on John Oliver and LastWeekTonight Emmys
In the rewrite room, which is packed with casually dressed staffers tapping on laptops, Oliver looks like the boss that he is. He’s been on his feet for more than two hours, taking down a huge iced coffee as he and executive producer/show-runner Tim Carvell refine the episode’s script, line by line, on a large flat-screen hooked up to Carvell’s computer.
The rest of the episode turns out to be tricky. In dress rehearsal, a segment about student debt and for-profit colleges was overlong, with an unfunny expository lump in the middle. Even worse, the planned use of a Frontline interview with nursing students complaining about their for-profit education sparked legal rumblings from their college, leading HBO’s own lawyers to request some awkward, disclaimer-y language.
“That’s better,” Oliver says. There are a few more details to take care of, including blocking movements for a guy dressed as a human-size astronaut gecko – but they have a show. The student-loan segment goes viral, as usual. “It was fine,” Oliver says, evaluating the episode afterward. “It wasn’t great. It was fine. There’s nothing I’ve done that I would ever classify as ‘great.’ It was OK.”-style home viewings of the show. “Fuck, no,” he says.
Oliver’s worldview has a lot in common with his friend and former collaborator Armando Iannucci, whose own HBO show,“John and I don’t sit down and say, ‘Let’s make something really depressing,'” says Iannucci. “We respond to what we see.” And then there’s the show’s report on the United States’ sloppy protection of nuclear-missile arsenals, which included an account of a drunk high-ranking general trying to get onstage with a Beatles cover band at a Mexican restaurant – in Russia. “Individually, the facts are horrendous,” Oliver says. “But in their totality, you can get them to a point where you either have to laugh at them or you’re about to walk into the river. You’ve got the choice.
He was rejected from college acting programs, but was a strong enough student to end up at ultra-elite Cambridge University, studying English literature with no particular enthusiasm. There, he discovered the “turbo level” of the British class system. “You get plunged into this world where people speak differently,” he says. “They’re very comfortable in their own skin, and they kind of presume success in their life. Any 18-year-old being that confident is kind of alarming.
He’s reluctant to analyze this incident. “As Americans, you’re more in touch with your emotions to think, ‘Let’s plumb the depths for this.’ I’m intent to just laugh that off. I’ll probably deal with that when I’m 70, in a rocking chair somewhere.” He’s never been in therapy. “I’m English. Repress! Push it all down! I’ve dealt with nothing! I’m a dormant volcano!”
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