‘Last Week Tonight’: HBO Lifts YouTube Release Delay For John Oliver’s Pre-Election Plea To Voters
Starting with the current Season 11 of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver in February, HBO pushed the release of each new Sunday night episode’s main story on YouTube from the following Monday to the following Thursday to drive up subscribers to the Max streaming service — a move Oliver called “massively frustrating.”
The network has lifted the mandate for last night’s episode, the last before the Nov. 5 Presidential election. Its main segment was released on YouTube shortly after the show had aired on the linear HBO network on the West Coast — even sooner than Last Week Tonight‘s previous Monday morning release schedule.
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This was a one-time exception based on the timeliness of Oliver’s monologue, in which he revealed that he was voting for VP Kamala Harris and urged everyone else to do so too, sources tell Deadline. The show will return to its regular four-day YouTube delay with its next episode.
As Deadline reported earlier today, an emotional Oliver — who stressed that “I love this country. I’m an immigrant. I chose to be here” — warned that “the damage of a second Trump term would last far beyond the next four years and encumber any potential progressive president in the future.”
“Wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where he’s no longer an active threat?,” he asked. “Just an annoyance?…I want so badly to live in that world and I hope everyone does everything in their power in the next 48 hours to make that world possible.”
By late Monday morning, the video had amassed more than 1.6M views on YouTube. You can watch it below.
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