John Oliver didn’t disappoint his corporate overlords on Sunday night by addressing the recent HBO Max name reversal — the latest in a series of changes for the streaming service.
During his main segment on Last Week Tonight, which was about President Trump’s often antagonistic relationship with the press, Oliver referred the current administration’s decision to ban the Associated Press from the Oval Office for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” a move Trump made soon after taking office.
Justifying the AP’s decision, Oliver noted: “It has clients all over the world, and lots of them still use the term the Gulf of Mexico, so it’s not as simple as you’re making out there, especially because it can take time for people to adjust to a stupid name change.”
He then turned to the recent decision by Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO and HBO Max, where Last Week Tonight airs. Showing the various logos/names onscreen, Oliver noted: “Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can even get used to one dumb name [HBO Go], some genius comes along and only makes it dumber [HBO Now], then somehow it gets dumber still [HBO Max], and then against all the odds, somehow it becomes even worse [Max], before inexplicably going back to the stupid thing it was before [HBO Max].”
Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Discovery streaming marketing chief Shauna Spenley last week said she was anxiously awaiting Oliver’s take on the streamer’s name change. Oliver notoriously isn’t afraid to go after whatever corporation owns his home network (from Time Warner to AT&T to Warner Bros. Discovery) on his show.
“We just cannot wait for his hot take on this whole rebrand,” Spenley told advertisers during the company’s upfront presentation to advertisers last week. “We think it’s going to be pretty hot.”
Oliver noted her comments, saying: “Incidentally, only this week, my parent company apparently said they cannot wait for my hot take on this whole rebrand — believing that whatever I say about this change was going to be pretty hot, so please look me in the eyes when I say this: Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do. I’m not gonna do it if you want it unless, wait, hold on, maybe you thought baiting me like that would be a good way to stop me from doing it, but on the other hand, how can a company be that smart when they’re the same people that came up with so many stupid fucking names?”
The show also featured brief graphic at the end of the opening credits with the various logos the streamer has used with the caption “Mutatis Mutandis.”
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