'Much more fun': John Oliver on how he's covering news (and doing comedy) in the age of Biden

Fans know HBO's "Last Week Tonight" is not your typical late-night comedy series.

Sure, British comedian and former "Daily Show" correspondent John Oliver is known for random bits like his avowed crush on actor Adam Driver, or his taunting of Danbury, Connecticut, which led the town's mayor to rename a sewage plant in his honor.

But the heart of the show is his educational deep dives into often arcane subjects mixed with comedic asides. Last season featured main segments on the meatpacking industry, ransomware, the power grid and union-busting tactics, which you're unlikely to see Jimmys Kimmel or Fallon tackle.

The half-hour series, which has collected 23 Emmy Awards since its 2014 premiere – including outstanding variety talk series in each of the last six years – returns for a ninth season Sunday (11 p.m. EST/PST).

But for obvious reasons, Oliver, 44, does not wish to preview upcoming segments.

"We don’t know what’s going to work" and make it into the show, he insists in an interview. Besides, "nothing is going to sound tantalizing. It's the same way that if we'd been talking last year and I said, 'Hey, Gary, we've got a great one on PACE loans,' you know people are gonna really want to tune in for that, right? 'Euphoria' kids, you’re nice and horny; get ready to feel the opposite of that, because it’s PACE loan time!"

Oliver spoke with USA TODAY about the challenges of covering President Biden vs. Trump, Joe Rogan, Whoopi Goldberg, and his newest attempt to "bite the hand that feeds you" once HBO and its parent company merges with Discovery. (Interview edited and condensed for clarity.)

Naming rights: City officials cheekily vow to name sewage plant after John Oliver following his anti-Danbury rant

Question: This show break feels different from the last, considering last year’s included an insurrection, an inauguration and a peak in the pandemic. How has it been for you, working on the new season of the show?

John Oliver: It's been absolutely great, partly because it felt like last year we managed to move back to being able to sell stories to people that they might not want to hear about. It wasn't as hard as during the first six months of the pandemic, when we were trying to work out, can we do a story about facial recognition without people thinking, ‘I don't want to hear this right now’? Last year, it felt gradually that we could do pieces on ransomware or PFRs or PACE loans, and it was slightly returning to being able to force feed people some stories that they might not want to eat.

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Q: By now you've done 239 episodes of "Last Week Tonight." Is it harder to come up with main segment topics that you haven't tackled before?

Oliver: Basically no, because there are so many things that we would like to talk about. But what is starting to become clear is that, as you look at certain stories that we're doing, you realize we actually talked a little bit about this before. The most obvious version is something like criminal justice, where you have different systems impacting each other in different ways. The thing I'm coming to really appreciate there is that you are starting to build a much bigger picture when you take these individual 20- or 30-minute stories and (explain) the relationship between them. And that that interconnectedness actually starts to advance your understanding of the broader picture.

Q: Does the public’s seeming exhaustion over bad news, whether it’s COVID or politics or both, affect how you produce the show?

Oliver: We're attracted to pretty bleak, complicated subjects, so if people really don't want to have those anymore, this might be the last time you and I speak. We do try to be cognizant of the fact that if a story is really bleak, as is often the case, either we'll try not to do too many of those (in a row) or we'll make sure that we have something very dumb at the end of it: Enter a duck stamp competition. So you are at least giving people a scoop of ice cream at the end of an overly nutritious meal.

Q: You've always said you didn't really love covering Trump, but for comedians, anyway, it seems like Biden has been sort of boring – and a lot of the late-night comics still can't seem to get enough of Trump.

Oliver: I sympathize with the situation that they're in, (but) for us it's actually been a real value added, because it's a little more interesting. (With) the Trump administration on immigration, you have a cartoon villain. You know that it's bad policy, built on malice. It's much more interesting to watch the Biden administration fail to change, and then sometimes actively advocate for keeping some of those policies.

And it did feel like, even from (Biden's) candidacy, this was someone who was likely not to have the scale of the solutions to meet the scale of the problems. And we've watched that unfold over the year.

When we're dealing with stories – something about bankruptcy reform or unemployment reform – the Trump administration didn’t (care) about that, that's fundamentally obvious. The Biden administration you assume does, or certainly has verbalized that he wants to do something about it, and then is either choosing not to or failing to. Either of those are really interesting, so it's been much, much more fun for us.

Q: OK, I just want to get your quick take on a couple of things in the news. Should Whoopi Goldberg have been suspended from "The View"?

Oliver: She's objectively, provably wrong in what she said, so she's dealing with the consequence of that. Whether those are the right consequences or not, I don't know. I am not her boss. That is up to ABC.

Q: What’s your take on the Joe Rogan Spotify situation?

Oliver: It feels like they're reckoning with the line between what a platform and a publisher is. Previously, (Spotify was) a platform. But when you employ (Rogan) and you make his show for him, that line between publishing and platform gets blurry, so now you're accountable in a very different way than you were before.

Secondly, it's clearly not just (about) Rogan. There is a much broader problem of people confidently passing on (malarkey) whether they know it's (malarkey) or not, and whether they intend to misinform or they actually misinform, at some point it doesn't really matter, right? The consequence is the same. There's a punchy hot take for you.

Q: With Discovery taking over WarnerMedia (the parent company of HBO), you're not going to have AT&T cellphone service to make fun of. So who's going to be your next target?

Oliver: I would point out the AT&T’s cellphone service is still going to exist in the world to the extent that it exists right now, which is (really) spottily. As for Discovery, if and when that takeover happens, I'm sure the first thing we'll do is find a way to bite the hand that feeds us, because there is no more delicious hand.

Q: Maybe Discovery's “Naked and Afraid”?

Oliver: Hey, I believe that you don't come for "Naked and Afraid" straightaway; you don't kick the golden goose in the head, all right? It's prestige TV!

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: John Oliver: 'Last Week Tonight' host on Trump, Biden and 'Euphoria'