‘Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver On Paramount Buying Warner Bros. Discovery: “Not Great News”

John Oliver has a history of berating the owners of his network, HBO. So much so, that he regularly refers to them as “business daddy”.

“It turns out we might be getting a new business daddy,” the Last Week Tonight host said at the beginning of tonight’s episode of Last Week Tonight. “Yeah, not great news. If I may quote anyone who’s ever accidentally sat on their Roku remote, ‘Oh shit, I’m in Paramount now. How the fuck do I get out of this?”

It comes days after Paramount surprised Hollywood by outbidding Netflix to strike a deal to acquire HBO owner Warner Bros. Discovery in a $110B deal. Netflix walked away from the deal after the David Ellison-run company increased its offer to $31 a share.

Whether Ellison and his crew will give Oliver the same grace to make fun of them and the company, if and when a deal is officially approved, remains to be seen.

Last month, Oliver joked that he didn’t know whether Paramount or Netflix would be his new business daddy. “It’s like a Mamma Mia! situation except less fun and way less sexy. But incidentally, if it is indeed Netflix, sorry for all the times I called your catalog a ‘who’s who of who the fuck is this?’,” he joked.

In 2019, Oliver, whose current contract runs through the end of the year, skewered then owner AT&T for its “terrible” phone service.

In 2022, not long after David Zaslav’s Discovery took over the iconic studio, he said that he had the “vague sense” that he was “burning down my network for the insurance money”.

Less than six months later, he took aim at the constant rebranding of HBO Max. “Our business daddy took its content purge up a notch and threw the whole HBO out,” he joked.

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