John Oliver Skewers Sean Duffy’s ‘God-Awful’ and ‘Ethically Dubious’ Road Trip Show That ‘Hardly Anyone’ Watched

Comedian John Oliver spent a good portion of his Sunday night HBO show skewering Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip reality series that was unceremoniously unloaded onto YouTube following congressional scrutiny over the ethics of the entire concept.

“Somehow, despite all his responsibilities, Duffy still found time to film The Great American Road Trip, and while its marketing materials described it as ‘a nationwide storytelling movement that invites Americans to explore the open road, and connect with their communities,’ as we learned this week, that’s not really what it is at all,” Oliver said on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight.

“It turns out, it’s basically just an expensively-produced test run of a Duffy family reality show, with each episode featuring a bare minimum about travel or America, but a ton of manufactured reality TV drama around the Duffys doing stuff like planning a family party or, over the course of several episodes, watching their daughter decide which college she’ll attend.”

That episode featured Sean Duffy and his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy — who met on the set of an MTV’s The Real World — explaining how Harvard would corrupt their daughter.

“They have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and, I think, corrupt their minds,” Duffy told his daughter in a clip.

“What the f*ck are you talking about?” Oliver exclaimed. “First, this was supposed to be a road trip. Why are we still in your kitchen? Second, is there anything less relatable than a family whose conflict is, how do I tell my daughter she can’t go to Harvard because we did too good a job raising her?”

“What’s concerning is [the Duffys] doing it on the back of the Department of Transportation, because it feels ethically dubious on so many levels,” Oliver said. “Which may be why, at this point, everyone involved in The Great American Road Trip seems like they’d rather just sweep it under the rug. ”

“Since it came out, the Duffys have barely promoted the show, and the Department of Transportation hasn’t posted about it at all. It is no wonder hardly anyone seems to have watched this thing. But even if everyone involved wants to move on and act like it never happened, I’m not sure that the rest of us should, because the appearance of a conflict of interest here is not going to go away,” Oliver said.

Sponsors of the show included Boeing, Royal Caribbean, Waymo, and other companies Duffy oversees as Transportation secretary.

Oliver ended the segment saying that a government watchdog group has filed both an official complaint and FOIA requests “to find out more about how all of this happened.”

“Which is good, because, I’ve got to say, having watched all three hours of this god-awful show, from gender reveals to the Duffy’s renewing their vows for no clear reason, it feels less like the country’s been taken on a road trip by Sean Duffy and a lot more like we’ve all been taken for a ride,” Oliver said.

Watch the clip above via HBO.

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