The news has been wild these past few months, what with gravitational waves and some guy named Donald Trump dominating the headlines. If it all sounds like too much to handle, worry not – John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight returns this Sunday to help you process the world around you. We spoke to Oliver about what we can expect to see this season – and to find out what we should do for Valentine’s Day. (Hint: The answer involves John Oliver.)
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So let’s talk about season 3. What can viewers expect to see during the election year?
JOHN OLIVER: Our election coverage is more likely to be about the process than the people. We’re more interested in the process itself than the personalities involved — we want to look at the underlying machinery of how elections work.
What kind of stories will that result in?
It’s hard to say because we have a built-in failure rate in the stories that we research, so right now, we’re banking a bunch of research just trying to make sure that we’re on solid ground when we start putting them together. There’s a bunch of different things that we’re looking at, but I don’t know which are going to stand up yet.
So last season you had a few surprises episodes and a lot of big running gags — there was the Edward Snowden interview and, of course, the church you founded. Do you have anything big like that planned for this season?
We do, we’ve got some long, germinating ideas. You know, the church took around six months, because we were involved in a correspondence with a seed faith pastor, and that took … that was about six months of back-and-forth. And then there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with lawyers to set up the church and the mechanics [so that we could] take people’s money accurately. So, we have a couple of ideas. If they come off right, they’ll be really fun, but most of the work right now is just setting things up.
One of the things we like is that it’s nice to try and have some of the stories be a surprise. I like the idea that people will watch without knowing necessarily what we’re going to talk about. And I guess Snowden was probably the apex of that.
And the interesting thing with that was we didn’t tell HBO we were going. I didn’t tell them until we got back from Russia, and then said, “Surprise! We just went to meet a fugitive, don’t be mad,” and then said I needed more time for that show because we couldn’t fit his interview into it.
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http://www.ew.com/article/2016/0T2/12/john-oliver-valentines-day-last-week-tonight
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