John Oliver locked in on an unexpected target during the latest episode of “Last Week Tonight”: Apple TV+.
Sunday’s episode of HBO’s late night series revolved around the working conditions of dollar stores. As Oliver covered, these stores are often understaffed to the point of only having one or two employees working at a time – and the employees that do work are underpaid and not given adequate support. One employee detailed how, after an armed robbery of her store, her district manager’s second question was about how soon the employee could reopen the store.
“That is ridiculous. An armed robbery is a traumatic event that people need time to recover from,” Oliver said. “It’s not something you can just ignore like a spam call or a broken lightbulb or any show on Apple TV.”
“Did you know that Octavia Spencer starred as a true crime podcaster on a show called ‘Truth Be Told’ for three seasons?” the late night host continued. “Of course you didn’t. It’s Apple TV, where celebrities go to hide.”
Oliver isn’t the only late night host who’s recently mocked Apple TV+. After making a joke about Chinese labor last week, Colbert joked that Apple had “canceled Jon Stewart again,” a nod to the streamer’s recent axing of “The Problem with Jon Stewart.” The storied host reportedly walked away from the series after he was given notes from Apple on how to cover China and artificial intelligence.
True to form, Oliver also saved a jab for his own parent network, Warner Bros. Discovery. Earlier in the episode, he mocked Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos for saying that his stores do “fabulous” in bad times. Oliver zeroed in on Vasos’ use of that particular word.
“Fabulous is best used to describe a quirky hat or the cast of ‘The Golden Bachelor’ or the fact that Kim Cattrall made a million dollars to sit in a car and not talk to Sarah Jessica Parker,” Oliver said.
That third example is a nod to the final episode of “And Just Like That” Season 2. After nearly two full seasons of fans begging for Cattrall to return to Max’s “Sex and the City” reboot as Samantha, the actor appeared in one brief scene to make brief a phone call to Parker’s Carrie. The quick cameo, in which the characters are canonically across the globe from each other, became one of the most hyped and discussed moments in the second season of the show.
