Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

A Disappointing Continuation

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Pepperidge Farms remembers. The first three seasons were very good. A wide variety of topics were covered, and my knowledge of the world expanded. After season 3, this show went down hill for me. Majority of season 4 (2017) was focused on Donald Trump and his Presidency. And on the first episode of season 5 (2018), the main topic yet again is Trump and his Presidency. Nothing interesting is being presented. The show has stagnated.

This show suffers from the same syndrome that affects our increasingly narcissistic society overall, and that is the tendency to believe that your very blatant, extreme political bias is not bias at all, but based in "objective scientific fact". As if it's been proved by science that we should all be liberals. Liberals always do this - they believe that all of their super biased political opinions aren't actually political opinions - but fact-based conclusions informed by science. As a result of this, they constantly stick science where it doesn't belong, and start claiming that science can answer questions like "how should I live my life" "should I respect my elders?" "should I tell the truth"? etc. More and more, young people are starting to think that spiritual questions like this are the domain of science, and as a result of this, they come to believe that their personal take on such questions isn't a personal value judgment, but a scientific conclusions that only religious conservatives and science-deniers could possibly disagree with. The fake news and spin in this show are so blatant that it's honestly worse than Soviet-Style propaganda - it's Soviet-style propaganda with an arrogant, narcissistic smirk. You know, that smirk that says "everything I say is based in objective fact, and the only people who could possibly disagree with it are the type who believe dinosaurs used to wear saddles". Almost every single thing Oliver says is either a lie, or spin, or an attempt to re-frame the entire issue with sleight-of-hand rhetoric.

I was never really into John Stewart of Stephen Colbert (nothing against those guys, I just never got around to watching the Daily Show or the Colbert Report) but my best friend recommended this show to me. Getting a different take on the news is pretty interesting and despite my initial reservations, I found myself binge watching episode after episode. The only place I was really familiar with John Oliver was his relatively short stint on Community. But I think he does a great job pulling double duty in Last Week Tonight. He gives insightful exposition on serious topics yet has to keep the audience engaged by trying to make them laugh. Sure, he borders on mugging at the camera during certain skits but this is a job that requires he walk a very fine line and I think he pulls it off. He's really the only cast member but a wide variety of celebrities cameo in his skits to keep things fresh (e.g. Nick Offerman, Keegan Michael-Key, Jeff Goldblum and Seth Rogen).This is a property where it would be hard to sway someone's opinion on it by just typing up a review. This show has definitive bias and if you don't fall within the target demographic, you'll quickly switch this off. But that shouldn't diminish the fact that this show does a great job helping people grasp important subjects that they probably should be paying more attention to. I laugh at almost every episode I watch and they pick from a wide range of topics to cover. They do the obvious subjects (President Elect Donald Trump is skewered on a regular basis) but they open people's eyes to problems that you don't encounter everyday (two of my favourite episodes covered food waste and mandatory minimum laws for drug offenders).At minimum this show is consistently entertaining and during certain episodes it can actually be pretty affecting. It means something that I still really like this show when Oliver is actually pretty critical of Canada on a constant basis. If you lean the way politically that Oliver and his crew do, this could end up being you're new favourite show. If you don't fit in that category, its best to skip this and go whine about it on your preferred social media website.

John Oliver's show is one in which he intersperses current events with comedy. And to keep your audience laughing while looking at such events today is quite a feat. I've only been familiar with Oliver and his show since March of 2016, so I didn't know about the kerfuffle raised when he was not picked to host The Daily Show after Jon Stewart left. However, I think things turned out for the best because John in a weekly show where he gets to go deeper on issues is probably more useful and funnier than John only getting a monologue and a few one liners in on a nightly show.John rarely has guests of any kind, so he has to be imaginative in his main segment or he risks getting preachy, which usually just consists of John talking to the audience with clips to illustrate the point he is making. Oliver always maintains a sense of humor even when he is discussing some of the more heinous institutions of American life such as the concept of medical debt and medical debt collections. He doesn't sport a condescending smile but rather a "isn't it ridiculous that we do things this way" smile. He is quite unpretentious, describing himself as a "rat faced Brit" and his show as "a petting zoo with a desk".Since I only started watching the show since 2016, John has been blessed with having Donald J. Trump as an unfortunate wealth of comic material. So far in the 15-18 months I have been watching the show, John has highlighted some really oddball third party presidential candidates in 2016, and in the most recent season he transformed his desk into a French Bistro to explain to the French people in their own tongue - while smoking! - why they should not vote for far right wing candidate Marine Le Pen, given a new train set to a local news show in Scranton - John is somewhat obsessed with local US news programs, and traveled to Pennsylvania to buy five wax figures of presidents from a presidential wax museum that was closing, one of them being Warren G. Harding. He then proceeded to show a trailer of a movie entitled "Harding" that could be made if one had access to a wax figure of the president, which his show did. It was actually the only trailer I've seen in the past two years that made me want to buy a movie ticket - and the film doesn't even exist! Highly recommended if you want to see some horrifying things about American political and economic trends that you will definitely not see on the 24 hour news cycle, and get some creative laughs to somewhat counteract that horror. Highly recommended.