UPDATE: We were right! The Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Show will premiere in April:
NEW YORK, Feb. 12, 2014 – HBO has confirmed the title and launch date for John Oliver’s topical half-hour comedy series. Presenting a satirical look at the week in news, politics and current events, LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER will debut SUNDAY, APRIL 27 (11:00-11:30 p.m. ET/PT), with other weekly editions debuting subsequent Sundays at the same time on HBO.
he show will be produced for HBO by Avalon Television, with John Oliver, Tim Carvell, James Taylor and Jon Thoday serving as executive producers, and Liz Stanton producing.
An Emmy®– and Writer’s Guild Award-winning writer, John Oliver was previously a correspondent for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” joining the show in 2006. He first came to prominence as a cutting-edge political stand-up performer in the UK with a string of TV appearances and sold-out solo shows at the Edinburgh Festival. Oliver won the Breakout Award at the Aspen Comedy Festival in 2007 and went on to write and star in the Comedy Central stand-up special “John Oliver: Terrifying Times,” followed by the series “John Oliver’s New York Stand Up Show,” which he has hosted for four seasons. With longtime collaborator Andy Zaltzman, Oliver co-writes and co-presents the popular weekly satirical podcast The Bugle, which currently receives more than 500,000 downloads a month. He also has a recurring role on the comedy series “Community.”
Oliver’s tenure as guest host on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” in summer 2013 prompted critical raves. The New York Times called him “clever and winning,” while TV Guide proclaimed, “John Oliver shines.” The Los Angeles Times described him as “instantly memorable,” and said, “John Oliver has proven himself funny in many venues.”
We first had the news on our site last year about John Oliver, of The Daily Show fame, getting his own weekly show on HBO. We here at 
HBOWatch are still eagerly awaiting any further news. In the meantime a bit of speculation has surfaced over just what the show will be and when it will air.
How similar will it be to John Stewart’s The Daily Show? Will he give his skew on politics a different vibe from REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER? We already know it will premiere this spring, but on what night of the week? Friday’s is reserved for Mr. Maher and his New Rules followed by VICE. Sunday is stuffed with original comedies and dramas. Is it time to branch out to a new night of the week? We are in the dark and it seems Mr. Oliver himself is not
USAToday seems to think it will air Sunday nights at 11:00pm. Do they really want to tuck him in after primetime on the night before the work week starts for most? Here is that info.
John Oliver’s new HBO series has no title, no decided-upon format, and no premiere date. He doesn’t even know whether he’ll have guests. But a few things are clear: It will air on Sundays at 11 p.m. ET/PT, probably starting in April, and will be taped a few hours earlier in New York, where the British comedian worked on The Daily Show for the past seven years and guest-hosted for Jon Stewart all summer, to generally rave reviews.
To the Salt Lake Tribune John Oliver had this to say:
“It will be similar [to The Daily Show] because it is me talking about things. As to Jon [Stewart]’s machine. – I was just driving that and trying not to crash it into a wall. That was his intricately built machine over a decade-and-a-half. So I need to now build something similar. We’ll have extra time to have a different perspective on things.That’s the attractive thing about being on at the end of the week is you can look backwards and forwards at the week coming.”
That seems to indicate a Sunday night location for the show as well. Lastly he says –
“This is my home now. I arrived here as an impostor on a visa, and now I am a legal permanent resident. It’s so romantic, that. I’m a green-card recipient, which means I can’t vote and I am taxed. So that IS taxation without representation. I usually start stand-up gigs by saying some version of, ‘I love it here, and I need you to remember that during the things I’m going to be saying over the next hour-and-a-half.’ And that normally helps. America has been very generous in what it has offered up as joke subjects over the years. And American politics in particular is a circus of crazy that is unparalleled around the world.”
So, his political platform seems intact; he just needs to figure out a distinctive enough of a format. It also appears that Sunday nights at 11:00pm ET is the preferred hour. HBOWatch will announce for certain when HBO’s official press release on the matter appears.
