John Oliver is no fan of mergers regardless of a company’s suitors. “I think mergers are generally bad,” the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight said last night on Trevor Noah‘s What Now podcast. “I think you’re always looking for the least bad option.”
In the case with the biggest potential impact on Oliver’s show, those options would include Netflix and Paramount in the pursuit of a Warner Bros. Discovery pact. But Oliver doesn’t seem overly concerned about the outcome either way.
Watch the podcast below. The merger discussion begins around the 53:00 mark.
“It’s going to get tied up in courts because you can’t really…there are going to be question marks on all of this, right?” Oliver said to Noah. “Because it’s very hard to justify this legally. Now, whether that makes it impossible for it to happen, that’s an open question. But again, you can’t waste time worrying about something that you’re not going to listen to anyway.”
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In other words, Oliver explained about Last Week Tonight‘s future, “It feels like we’re just going to do what we do.”
“I think you’re always hoping for the least bad option,” Oliver continues. “And I think that the key thing for us is to act with enough, like aggression or confidence…I will act assuming nothing is going to happen. We’re not going to change, right? I think we’ve been on [and] we’ve been behaving the way we’ve been behaving for long enough that you can’t really reason with us.”