John Oliver on Reaching Past Low-Hanging Trump Fruit For New Season: We’ve ‘Got to Work Harder’

John Oliver piloted his Last Week Tonight through its first presidential cycle with aplomb, wit, and his former boss’s unyielding allergy to B.S. With the freedom to take the long view of the news, he presided over a feast of lucid, hilarious deep dives into matters of public interest too often overlooked. As surely as he mocked the media cycle, he drove it too: No Monday morning was complete without an explosion of “John Oliver Eviscerates This” and “John Oliver Smashes That” recaps. His was and remains the Sunday show that delivers the punchline to every other Sunday show.

You’d be hard pressed to find very many people who wouldn’t put John Oliver‘s name at or near the top of every imaginable late night comedy metric in American television.

After all, the former Daily Show correspondent has developed a niche and voice all his own in the crowded late night field, setting himself apart with lengthy deep-dive segments that consistently deliver laughs as frequently as socially-conscious content. And the impacts of Oliver’s segment translate far beyond the screens of YouTube, where the Last Week Tonight page touts tens of millions of unique views; after one notable segment on scholarships for women, for example, the Society of Women Engineers credited Oliver directly for a spike in donations.

He spoke with a roundtable of journalists today in anticipation of Sunday night’s fourth season premiere, discussing how to handle the GOP elephant in the room: President Donald Trump.

Oliver noted that a series of executive orders signed by the 45th President of the United States seemed to have been stories that the talented and dogged Last Week Tonight staff uncovered first. “Over five days last week, each executive order related to a story we’ve done in the past three years,” he told the reporters.

He also seemed to proudly make note of that fact that despite the mainstream media’s obsession with Trump livestreams, broadcasts, rallies, Tweets, and even food choices, the HBO show largely kept Trump coverage to a healthy proportion. He noted that only eight of the thirty 2016 episodes focused their deep-dive segments on Trump or the presidential election. Rather, it was his stories about subjects like school segregation, multilevel marketing scams, and opioid abuse that seems to have resonated strongly with an eager audience.

Oliver continued Monday, “As a benefit to us we’ve been pushed into covering things that no one in their right minds would cover for comedy.” He also discussed the unique breakdown of their show, which airs 30 straight minutes weekly without a commercial break, saying, “We can be structurally ambitious with what we do.”

But when it comes to handling the Trump presidency, the easy jokes don’t necessarily mean that they’re prepared to change their approach to a man who makes news every hour of the day. “I don’t think it necessarily needs to change — you’ve probably got to work harder. That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” he said. “There’s lots of low-hanging fruit with administrations like this. You kind of need to reach past that.” That said, his runaway smash hit was undoubtedly his Make Donald Drumpf Again 22 minute segment that catapulted the show into the front row of the American political zeitgeist.

Oliver took home the Emmy this past fall for Outstanding Variety Series, edging out James Corden, Jerry Seinfeld, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and network stalwart Bill Maher in the process.

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[h/t Variety]