John Oliver talks Last Week Tonight behind the scenes, says HBO lawyers have never killed a story and there are six stories in the works at one time

Collider

"They haven't killed anything," Oliver tells Collider in a wide-ranging interview. "We have a pretty vigorous back and forth with them with every story that we do. I think and hope we've built up a little bit of trust over the years and that we have done our homework. When they say, but have you reached out to Amazon? Yes, of course we have. Here is the back and forth, here's their pushback, here's how we're going to try and build that into the script. So I think there is a better working trust on both sides whilst accepting that it is a relationship built on some degree of tension. Because I think they understandably would rather that we were not sued. I don't really mind about that it's just I do accept that we have to win any lawsuit. They think their job is not to get us sued and I think their job is when we get a sued that we should win. Which is a distinction with a slight difference." As for Last Week Tonight working on six stories at one time, Oliver says the show used to work on one story throughout the week, each week. "So then all of a sudden it's Friday and you actually have a blank page again and you have to start talking on Sunday," he says. "So it was clear that we needed to completely reconfigure the way that we made our show. Now those main stories they take about six weeks to do. So we're working on six at once. So six stories at any one time we're in various stages of development. From being about to be filmed, to really being about to be thought about. We're constantly spinning stories which comes with its own challenges but it does enable us to have much more time to finesse stories and get them right."