Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Military Translators, Supreme Court
Season 1, Episode 21 · Aired 2014-10-19
Synopsis
This week's topics include Putin's impressive trip to Milan, a McDonald's Q&A board promising to answer all questions truthfully and the bureaucratic roadblocks preventing local nationals who translate for coalition forces from obtaining U.S. immigrant visas. This segment includes an in-studio interview with Mohammad, a translator whose attempts to obtain a visa took three years, and lost family members to the Taliban during that time. The last segment tries to solve the problem of boring news coverage of Supreme Court sessions (because the court does not allow video). Last Week Tonight shows how the coverage can be made more compelling by using animals staged as the Justices and other court employees. The show then thoughtfully provides ten minutes of raw footage for news outlets to use to create their own Supreme Court reenactments.
In the series
This episode is part of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (2014–present) on HBO.
Longform late-night investigations — net neutrality explainers as comedy events.
Key cast
- John Oliver as Host
Also in season 1
- S01E01 Indian General Election, NSA's New Image, POM Wonderful LLC v. Coca-Cola Co.
- S01E02 Death Penalty, François Hollande, the Sultan of Brunei
- S01E03 Bill Nye, the U.S. Senate Election in Kentucky, Global Warming Controversy
- S01E04 Fareed Zakaria, General Motors, Right to Be Forgotten
- S01E05 Net Neutrality, Tony Abbott, 87th Scripps National Spelling Bee
- S01E06 FIFA and the World Cup, Bashar al-Assad