SoHo Adds Oliver to Late Night

SoHo will screen Last Week Tonight With John Oliver late-night Tuesdays from April 29, two days after its US broadcast.

This is an about-turn for the premium drama channel, which wasn’t interested in picking up The Daily Show, on which Oliver made his name, or The Colbert Report when Sky’s Comedy Central inexplicably dumped them four years ago.

“I am a genuine fan of Real Time [With Bill Maher] and The Daily Show, and both shows are nothing short of brilliant, but at the end of the day, SoHo has a pretty strict and established template of quality, provocative, and innovative drama,” Sky’s entertainment chief and SoHo mastermind Travis Dunbar told ScreenScribe.tv.

“To try and mess with a formula this successful, irrespective of the merits of the shows you mention, would be in our opinion unwise. It is not broken, and we certainly do not intend to fix it.”

However, the fact that LWT is an HBO property would have helped changed his mind given HBO is SoHo’s principal supplier. (UPDATE: Dunbar has since responded to this post.)

It will screen at 10pm, ahead of Breaking Bad, and will be quite a bit like The Daily Show, Oliver told The Washington Post, except it will be once a week.

“The resemblance to his former TV home doesn’t stop with the host, however,” the Post said. “The new show will be run by executive producer Tim Carvell, who was the head writer and co-producer on The Daily Show.”

Oliver says the challenge will be to pick up on stories that haven’t yet been chewed over at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — as well as by Kimmel, Conan, Letterman, Fallon, Ferguson, Bill Maher, Seth Meyers and Saturday Night Live — by the time Last Week gets around to them.