Oh, good. We needed a one-man imitation of The Daily Show on Sunday nights. That is not meant with sarcasm. If Jon Stewart's fine with that, I'm fine with it. I guess I was just expecting something a bit different of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver beyond the absence of bleeps and voices other than the host's.
Then again, the host is very funny. I hope the program evolves away from being a Daily Show clone and I hope Mr. Oliver slows down and doesn't slavishly read the TelePrompter at a brisk clip every week. There were moments there on his first outing where I wanted to yell at the screen, "What's your hurry? You've got the job!" Then I realized his hurry was that they had more material than minutes. The show, which I TiVoed and watched soon after, ran over 30 minutes so I didn't catch the end. Fortunately, the various HBO channels are rerunning the show about eighty thousand times over the next week so I set up to record it again any minute now, just to see the goodnights and credits.
But that's my big complaint. The material was sharp and none of it felt like he was picking through what Stewart and Colbert threw away. So I've already set my TiVo for next week's episode…for 35 minutes.