John Oliver kicked off the fourth season finale of his Emmy-winning HBO talk show Last Week Tonight with a “lightning recap of the week,” including a brief riff on the biggest news out of Hollywood: the fall of renowned comedian Louis C.K. 
 
 Yes, this week in Tinseltown terribleness offered us “The New York Times reporting Louis C.K.’s gross sexual misconduct, which is completely indefensible, and which inevitably resulted in the cancellation of his new film, Exhibit A if This Ever Goes to Trial.” 
 
 At least five then up-and-coming female comedians have accused C.K. of extreme sexual harassment—trapping them in a room and forcing them to watch him masturbate. The deeply disturbing (yet widely whispered) revelations resulted in FX, HBO, and Netflix severing professional ties with the comic, and The Orchard canceling the release of his upcoming film/provocation, I Love You, Daddy. 
 
 “Now, as for the president,” Oliver continued, “he’s been overseas all week, which should have been relaxing for the rest of us—until this happened last night.” 
 
 Oliver then threw to a tweet from @realDonaldTrump, the online alias of the biggest troll in Twitterville: the 45th president of the United States. 
 
 Yes, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un calling President Trump “old” apparently got under his spray-tanned skin. After all, he once told Dr. Oz, “I feel the same age as [Tom Brady],” adding that he sees a 35-year-old when he looks in the mirror (Brady is an in-shape 40, Trump is 71 and fluctuates between three and four chins). 
 
 “This would be the stupidest possible reason for all of us to die,” Oliver remarked of the Lil’ Kim tweet. “I’m serious: If the entire country simultaneously tripped while putting on its underwear and fell face-forward into the toilet, got stuck, and drowned, it would be considerably less stupid than if that tweet caused a nuclear apocalypse.” 
 
 Later on in the program, Oliver sped through a recap of Trump’s chaotic first year in the White House, concluding: “Trump’s presidency is like one of his handshakes: It pulls you in whether you like it or not.” ||||| Last summer, John Oliver stepped in for Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show effortlessly–so effortlessly that it became almost a foregone conclusion that he would have his own show before too long, for someone. That someone turned out to be HBO, the show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. And while I’m not privy to the conversations that took place in signing and developing it, the debut suggested that what HBO asked for was: “That thing you did when you filled in for Stewart? We’ll take that thing, a half hour, once a week. Oh, and you can swear.” 
 
 There was no Carlos Danger on last night’s debut–there are new buffoons to kick around now. But the episode otherwise hewed so closely to the fake-news format and Oliver’s past work on TDS that it might well have been called The Weekly Show With John Oliver–an extra, weekend-magazine-length version of what fans have enjoyed on Comedy Central for years. 
 
 That is, of course, not a bad thing at all. 
 
 The first installment of Last Week Tonight was very much a one-man show, the bulk of it taken up with an extended news-desk segment—like Stewart’s, but with room for more segments and more time to build momentum. (It was such a familiar setup that as it went on something felt strange, and I realized I was unconsciously waiting for, phantom-limb-like, the Comedy Central commercial break.) Counterintuitively for a move to a big-budget network, it’s a stripped-down affair, in some ways like a podcast (i.e., Oliver’s The Bugle). 
 
 The fake-cast’s distinctions are its schedule, its length (an actual 30 minutes, not 20-ish with ads), and its host, and Last Week Tonight‘s first outing took advantage of each. Producing one show a week may make last week less timely (as the show’s promos have joked about), but it also lets the staff cherry-pick a week’s worth of news, and they got lucky this time. First, there was the serendipity of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling (“It turned out to be a rough week for unrepentent racists and recording devices”), and the fact that the Sterling comments broke late in the week gave Oliver first crack at them. 
 
 Maybe more important in the long run is that that full half-hour gives Oliver the room to do more than one of those Daily Show-esque deconstructions of news and the media. The India elections segment must have been something Oliver and the writers had been marinating on for a while—he mentioned it to Jack Dickey in TIME’s recent profile—and it formed into a sweeping essay on news-media provincialism, the export of cable-news sensibilities around the globe, and the actual issues at stake in the world’s largest democracy. 
 
 All that came filtered, as it did on Oliver’s Daily Show interregnum, through his sharper tone and his globalist, English-outsider perspective. (“Let’s deal with Gandhi first–and I realize this is not the first time that sentence has been said in a British accent.”) Oliver is verbally nimble and able to deliver a joke, but he also, more often than Stewart, is willing to voice genuine passion over his subjects. Here HBO’s content guidelines come in handy: in a segment on misleading food marketing, his response to a claim that frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts will make your kids “rise and shine” was a single, pitch-perfect “Fuck. You.” 
 
 The first newscast did feel simultaneously long and breathless, maybe because there was little to vary it or break up the topic segments. I can understand Oliver not wanting to further mimic The Daily Show with correspondent bits. (He served as his own correspondent, in a pointed interview with former NSA head Keith Alexander about the agency’s image, getting the former chief to volunteer the slogan, “The only agency in government that really listens.”) If Oliver wants to keep the show’s bare-bones format, some more varied taped pieces could work (like the Lisa Loeb parody of a twee Oregon ad for its glitch-plagued health exchange), as might some different desk bits that would give him the change to change up the show’s rhythms. 
 
 But it was a funny, confident start. I, like I’m guessing a few of you, DVR The Daily Show, watching it sooner when there’s a story I can’t wait to hear Stewart’s take on, later when there’s not. For now, I’ll gladly add Last Week Tonight to that pile and watch to see if it becomes essential. In which case, your Sunday TV glut just got a half-hour longer.
– John Oliver really made use of "HBO’s liberal profanity policy" Sunday night on Last Week Tonight, as Slate puts it. The host, who became a new dad just days ago, opened his show with a discussion of the Paris terror attacks, and he did not hold back. "It's hardly been 48 hours, and much is still unknown, but there are a few things we can say for certain," he said. "And this is when it actually helps to be on HBO, where those things can be said without restraint. Because, after the many necessary and appropriate moments of silence, I'd like to offer you a moment of premium cable profanity." Then he let the F-bombs fly: "First, as of now, we know this attack was carried out by gigantic fucking assholes," he continued. "Unconscionable flaming assholes, possibly working with other fucking assholes, definitely working in service of an ideology of pure assholery. Second, and this goes almost without saying, fuck these assholes. Fuck them, if I may say, sideways. And third, it is important to remember, nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work. France is going to endure. And I'll tell you why: If you're in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck." The entire rant is here.