John Oliver leads changing of the guard on variety TV

John Oliver doesn’t look like a late night host. He doesn’t have the easy charm that they all seem to possess. He’s hilarious — there’s no question about that — but he’s got a base coat of awkward nerdiness. When it was announced that he would be leaving the Daily Show to start his own news comedy program, it was hard to imagine him carving out a niche competing against the dual colossus of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Yes, he had generated hosting buzz while filling in for Stewart while the longtime Daily Show host took eight weeks off to direct Rosewater in mid-2013. But that buzz was about him eventually replacing Stewart, not going head to head against him — not to mention the cultural phenomenon that was The Colbert Report.

Riding the wave from his successful summer run, in December 2013 HBO announced that Oliver would host Last Week Tonight. A weekly show that, while not competing with the other two shows for the same daily timeslot, would certainly provide vastly similar content to what Stewart and Colbert had produced to earn the previous 12 consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Variety Series. When he started, however, it quickly became apparent that this new model — only running once a week and unencumbered by corporate sponsorships by being on HBO — was not only unique enough to justify its existence but consistently great enough that it eclipsed The Daily Show in terms of Q-rating seemingly overnight. The once-a-week timeslot allowed writers to pick and choose only the biggest stories and polish their jokes to perfection, while The Daily Show was constrained to living up to its name and putting on a show every night, whether there was good material on any given day or not. The lack of concern about corporate interests was also a big factor. It was extremely freeing. All of a sudden the ability of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to push the envelope on what their sponsors would allow was not enough. It is no longer cool to push the limit when your competition has no limits. In two years, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show had gone from a 10-consecutive-Emmy media giant to outdated. Comedy Central was surely kicking itself.

The channel’s heart must have sank when the supremely talented Colbert finally outgrew them and accepted the tall task of replacing David Letterman on CBS’s The Late Show, incidentally, the last variety show to win the Emmy before the Comedy Central onslaught way back in 2002. They had groomed the perfect successor to Colbert in Oliver, and they had let him slip away. They were left with the solid, but recently unspectacular Stewart and a soon-to-be-empty 11:30 timeslot. Last Week Tonight premiered 17 days after Colbert’s exit was announced. Two weeks, and lots of speculation, later Colbert’s successor was announced: Larry Wilmore. Like Colbert, Wilmore has been a longtime correspondent on the Daily Show talent farm. Unlike Colbert, Wilmore is only very talented instead of a preternaturally gifted cultural lightning rod. The Nightly Show, née The Minority Report, is quite good. But in replacing a show as universally beloved as The Colbert Report, it was almost understood that it would suffer in comparison to the Colbert experience, at least at first. The Nightly Show is thankfully not trying to be the Report. Gone is the satirical spirit and the host playing an over-the-top character every night. No, the Nightly Show is much closer to its daily counterpart in spirit. Its tone is more serious, about as serious as a show on Comedy Central can be. Wilmore is a fine host, but if Oliver doesn’t look like a typical late night host, then Wilmore is even further from the archetype. He’s no Colbert, that’s a given. But compared to Wilmore’s friendly uncle looks, Oliver is Steve McQueen. Given their relatively close premiere dates and their shared Daily Show roots, Oliver’s and Wilmore’s shows will inevitably be measured against each other. So far, it’s not close. Wilmore’s show is relatively new, even compared to Last Week Tonight, so perhaps it needs more time to gain traction. But it certainly is not evoking the same feeling of a meteoric rise that Last Week Tonight generated.

Perhaps it is a result of the HBO-induced freedom, but Oliver is much closer to Colbert’s free-wheeling spirit than Wilmore could ever hope to be. In Last Week Tonight’s midseason finale, he was already able to work in a gag where he used a salmon cannon to launch fish at the faces of famous faces of the likes of Stewart, Colbert, Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Tom Hanks and even Homer Simpson. Those are the farcical heights that will likely never be reached on Wilmore’s show, which is straightforward, informative and his panels have started some very interesting conversations. But no one is racing to share the latest poignant point that was brought up by Bill Burr on The Nightly Show.

Ultimately, in the modern late night game, what really matters is creating shareable moments that get shared all over the Internet. Fallon is a master of this with his endless games with celebrities. Jimmy Kimmel and Colbert also routinely made the rounds with their buzz-producing clips. Oliver was quickly a master of making clips that generated that kind of buzz. But where Fallon needs lip-sync battles to make the rounds, Oliver doesn’t (salmon cannon notwithstanding). The videos being shared from Last Week Tonight are routinely 8- to 10-minute-long marathons of Oliver dissecting a hot news topic and expertly extracting all the comedic juice from it while at the same time being extremely informative about the matter at hand. Oliver is getting views by lecturing. In our attention-deprived media environment, that is insane. It’s a testament of the strength of the Last Week Tonight model. Oliver has managed to meld the farce of Colbert with compelling, incisive analysis. Now that it is back from hiatus, The Nightly Show will probably fall further back in its formidable shadow. He might not look the part, but Oliver is seeming more and more like the new king of variety TV.

Daniel Grzywacz is a senior majoring in anthropology and neuroscience. He is also the lifestyle editor at the Daily Trojan. His column, “The Showbiz Must Go On,” runs Mondays.