John Oliver has a plan for Netflix’s proposed purchase of HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery.
“I think you’re always hoping for the least bad option,” the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver host said on Thursday’s episode of What Now? With Trevor Noah.
Oliver, whose HBO show is now in its 12th season on HBO Max, said that mergers are “generally bad.”
“This would be our third merger,” Oliver told Noah.
His show premiered on HBO in April 2014, two years before AT&T purchased its parent company, Time Warner, for over $100 billion. Six years later, in 2022, AT&T divested Time Warner in a merger with Discovery, Inc, creating Warner Bros. Discovery.
All the while, though, Oliver kept producing episodes of his Emmy-winning comedy news show.
Now, Warner Bros. Discovery is engaged in a contentious bidding war between suitors Netflix and Paramount Skydance. It remains unclear who will own the HBO parent company, or if the deal will even be legally allowed. Paramount, run by the MAGA-friendly David Ellison, could create bigger problems for Oliver.
“I will act as if nothing will change,” Oliver told Noah, noting that his team will go forward with “aggression” and “confidence.”
“We’ve been behaving the way we’ve been behaving for so long that you can’t really reason with us,” he remarked. “So there’s no point in doing that.”
Noah, who joined The Daily Show just after Oliver left, likened Oliver’s crew to an “unreasonable village.”
“Every empire had it, whether it was the Mongols or the Romans or whoever,” Noah said, describing a stubborn, tiny village that wasn’t worth the effort to fully conquer. “Just leave them. Just let them do their thing,” he continued, waving off the imaginary village.
“You want to be that village,” Oliver agreed. “You want to be that village that’s so unreasonable that gigantic corporate armies just go, ‘Just leave them alone.’ That’s all you want.”
Oliver reiterated that he wanted to “be enough trouble that you’re not worth it.”
The notoriously uncooperative show has maintained its independence through two multi-billion dollar mergers and numerous lawsuits—none of which they have lost, Oliver declared.
“You can’t waste time worrying about something that you’re not going to listen to anyway,” Oliver said.
It’s hard to argue with Oliver’s disposition. The HBO show has won three Peabody Awards and been nominated for more than 70 Emmys, including 11 consecutive wins for Best Writing in a Variety Series.
“They, whoever they are, are going to have to realize either you ignore us like that irritating village, or you’re going to have to take us around the back of the woodshed,” Oliver said.
