One of the best shows on any channel is HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Over its first eight seasons, Oliver and his brilliant team of writers have repeatedly tackled important issues like net neutrality, elections, and censorship, all while making the audience laugh. The way the show threads the needle with disseminating information with humor is nothing short of remarkable and it explains why the series has won so many awards.

With Last Week Tonight returning with new episodes this evening, I recently had the opportunity to speak with John Oliver. During my exclusive interview, Oliver revealed how they are always working on six main stories at all times, how he works with the HBO lawyers, what fans would be surprised to learn about the making of the show, why he is extremely careful with what he asks the audience to do, how they pulled off the Adam Driver joke which ended with him appearing on the show, Russell Crowe’s perfect joke, and if he’s more proud of the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward or the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant.

Check out what John Oliver had to say below.

COLLIDER: I want to start with a thank you. I love your show and I really love what you do in terms of shining a light on society and issues and I just want to say thank you.

JOHN OLIVER: Oh, thanks. I very much appreciate that.

When it started, HBO gives you the show, what's your dream in terms of how many episodes you think you're going to be able to pull off before they say, "Get off our channel."

OLIVER: That is a fantastic question. I think, initially your dream is to do one show. To do one show that makes it onto television. After that, I think you probably want to know what double figures feels like. Can we get to 10 shows? I genuinely, at the start of it, could not fathom doing more than 10 show. Which is a bit of a problem because we had to do 24 the first year. So then you get to the end of the first year, you're not canceled, and you realize, okay, so now we need to learn all the hard lessons that we have learned through some combination of failure, incompetence and bad luck over the first year and you have to try and do it better.

Its felt like at the end of each year it's just been a question of trying to pick yourself back up, think okay, well let's not do those three things again and try and improve going forward. That was massively exacerbated of course with the pandemic where it just felt like we got a handle on how to make it and then all of a sudden a situation basically says to you “sure, but could you do this without an office and a studio and at home?” And the answer was maybe. Not well, but maybe.

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Image via HBO

RELATED: Watch: Adam Driver Hilariously Confronts John Oliver in ‘Last Week Tonight’ Finale

You definitely pulled it off considering the obstacles. As a fan of Last Week Tonight, what do you think fans would be surprised to learn about the making of Last Week Tonight behind the scenes?

OLIVER: I guess, in terms of the pandemic that I don't know to what extent this was surprising to people, that white void was in my home. So my kids were outside the door. The line between work and family life was about three inches. It kind of felt doing a show on your own at home, it turns out, feels a lot like not having a TV show at all. I don't know how chaotic people thought it was but it was very, very chaotic. I'd have to stop because a dog barked or my kids barged in wanting to know why the iPad had paused during an episode of Paw Patrol. That was difficult.

I don't want to what extent people know about our process. We work on those long stories that we do, our main stories. We started off doing those... This goes back to your question about what we thought of when we began. We started off doing those once a week. Come in, think what should we talk about? Okay, let's talk about the death penalty. Then by the end of that week, we'd have to do a show on it.

It very quickly came clear that that was not sustainable. We would start writing immediately then two days later research would come in which would wash away the foundations upon which those jokes were written. So then all of a sudden it's Friday and you actually have a blank page again and you have to start talking on Sunday. So it was clear that we needed to completely reconfigure the way that we made our show. Now those main stories they take about six weeks to do. So we're working on six at once.

So six stories at any one time we're in various stages of development. From being about to be filmed, to really being about to be thought about. We're constantly spinning stories which comes with its own challenges but it does enable us to have much more time to finesse stories and get them right.

I was very curious how many stories you guys were working on behind-the-scenes.

OLIVER: Yeah, always six.

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Image via HBO

But I'm so curious, the first few seasons nobody really knows you. You can get away with like sending emails to people asking for comment.

OLIVER: Yes.

They have no idea what you're after. But now when an email comes in from Last Week Tonight, most people know, they're coming after us.

OLIVER: Right.

How has it changed behind the scenes when you want to reach out to someone for comment knowing that they're going to probably get on the defensive once they get that email.

OLIVER: It's a great question. It has changed. In a sense though, it's actually got a little bit easier because people will engage immediately. Because they're perhaps worried. We're probably not going to call the Sackler family and say, "we're just looking to do a puff piece about your donations to museums and what a nice group of people you seem to be." They as a family engaged in a very hostile way, right? That's how they engage in general.

Companies can also behave in a pretty hostile way. I think we have got much better over the years at seeing through the bluster and knowing where potential actual problems in our story would be. So you can actually use it as a net positive because you can solidify, you can kind of get ahead of their criticisms by baking those criticisms into the show and you can make sure that if you do get sued, you are going to win that lawsuit. I will say one other thing that we learned in terms of, like you say, going from a show that nobody had heard of because it hadn't existed and very few people were watching, we did become more careful in terms of what we were asking people to do.

Early on I think we did a piece in our... It might have been our first show about food labeling and we kind of came up with this idea of put a sticker, I can't remember what it was, but it was like here's a more honest sticker, you could go to supermarkets, print it out, put it on stuff. I might not do that now because I think what became clear was, around the net neutrality piece, that it became clear that people would do something that we asked them to do. So now generally we don't ask, well we never ask people to do something that we would not be comfortable with them actually doing. We need to be prepared, right? If we're going to sell like we did this year a bunch of teddy bears to off Lukashenko, we better get those bears red because they're going to get sold.

In the past there would be a lower consequence to perhaps saying to people, right, email this person. Because they get between five and zero emails. Now I would be much, much more careful. So when we did a story about robo calling and we said here are the office numbers of the people involved in making these decisions about robo calls, we knew those phones are going to get obliterated in the 12 hours. I think we're a lot more cautious in terms of anticipating the consequences to things that we ask people to do, if that makes sense.

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Image via HBO

Absolutely. Obviously, people love when you have Adam Driver on, George Clooney, the celebrities. When you're making a joke about Adam Driver early in the season, do you already know the payoff because he’s going to be on the show?

OLIVER: No, that was a one-off joke. That was one of the final shows that we actually had in the studio before the pandemic kicked in. I just liked it because it was a really funny joke. The audience seemed to like it a little bit and be very uncomfortable as well. And it was the perfect synthesis of those two reactions. So then we did it again and then again and it felt like a really fun joke format. Then we were about to stop because it felt like, well, unless this joke is heading somewhere to your point, It probably should end.

That was when we reached out to Adam Drive to say, “hey, I don't know if you know we are doing this joke, if you would like to come on at the end of the year I will keep going and we'll set it up. If not, we will stop.” Because we did not want to get into that situation, exactly like you say, where you are building to a payoff and you can't stick the landing. So once we knew he was going to come at the end of the year, at that point, and this is five jokes in, at that point we realized, oh, we are continuing this at the end of the year then. But you can confidently accelerate knowing that the payoff is going to be beautiful.

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Image via HBO Max

I would imagine there's a lot of important people now that actually watch your show, love your show, love what you're doing and want to participate. So has it changed in the last year or two where you're getting, I don't know, some huge name calling you and saying, I wouldn't mind being the butt of a joke and I'd like to be included?

OLIVER: People don't call me. I've occasionally run into people. I haven't really been anywhere. Say the Emmys, that's the one place I've been in the last two years. I ran into a few people there who would say, "Oh, I'd be really happy to do something on your show." And I do have to say to them, “Careful, is that real?” Because we will call you to do something. So this would be the time to very comfortably say, "No it's not real, I'm just being polite." You go, "Of course. Then we will not bother you anymore."

But yeah, to those people who said, “Oh yeah, I'd love to do something,” we very much keep those names on cards and think we'll find something for you. That would be a very... And all you know that there are certain stories that people actually have a personal connection to. So weirdly with George Clooney that was a story about sponsored content on local news and the way that it was kind of destroying the legitimacy of local news one cut at a time. George Clooney's dad was a local newsman. We knew that, of course that is immensely personal to him that story. So that is why he did that, that's why we thought that he had might have more interest.

Similarly, we did something about PFAS this year and Danny DeVito did a really funny bit at the end of it. We thought he might do it because he has been really involved in trying to push legislation to regulate these chemicals. It wasn't completely crazy to us that he said yes in a way that it would be if it was about something else.

I think that the way you balance comedy with what you're talking about with a celebrity element, it all gels together to break through the noise.

OLIVER: Like the beauty with George Clooney, other than his face, voice, and you can only imagine his smell through the camera, was that especially in very complicated stories, having the ability to suddenly have a splash of glamor in there that has such monumental benefit to us. If you are trying to troll people's attention through a story about payday loans, which is really important but very complicated, boy oh boy does it help to be able to say here's Clooney and he's angry with me. Anyway, as we were saying. It is a real sip of water in a desert.

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Image via HBO

What ideas have been killed by the HBO lawyers? Or have there been a number of them? What is it like behind the scenes?

OLIVER: They haven't killed anything. We have a pretty vigorous back and forth with them with every story that we do. I think and hope we've built up a little bit of trust over the years and that we have done our homework. When they say, but have you reached out to Amazon? Yes, of course we have. Here is the back and forth, here's their pushback, here's how we're going to try and build that into the script.

So I think there is a better working trust on both sides whilst accepting that it is a relationship built on some degree of tension. Because I think they understandably would rather that we were not sued. I don't really mind about that it's just I do accept that we have to win any lawsuit. They think their job is not to get us sued and I think their job is when we get a sued that we should win. Which is a distinction with a slight difference.

Are you more proud of the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward or the John Oliver Memorial Sewer Plant?

OLIVER: I'm immensely proud of both. One, the koala ward is the unexpectedly perfect joke from Russell Crowe. I didn't think he would be so good at practical jokes like that. And it was a perfect joke because it's an excellent fuck you and it actually sends a whole bunch of money to a really worthwhile cause. But more importantly than anything it's incredibly funny. There is nothing I don't love about that. You know what I love about both of them is that we are in control of most of our jokes, right? Both of those we were not in control of. That's Russell Crowe's idea for a joke and he executed it perfectly.

With Danbury Connecticut you are saying it would be really... like they initially say, “Oh, we'll name this after you.” Their idea, incredibly funny. Calling it a Memorial sewer plants even funnier. And then you're kind of trusting them saying, don't ruin this. If you keep fighting us in the funny way here we can send a bunch of money to food banks and charities in your area, we can do this together. The fact that they handled that so well at every stage, it's not just that the joke is funny, it's that it didn't collapse in very volatile situations if that makes sense. So I have such happy memories of both of those jokes.

I'm being given the wrap up things so I'm just going to stop and say I really appreciate your work.

OLIVER: Thanks so much for this, it's been really fun.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returns with new episodes tonight.