John Oliver Stayed Quiet About David Ellison Taking Over HBO

Sunday's episode went after the Secret Service instead, two days before Ellison's $111 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger closes.

John Oliver spent Sunday's "Last Week Tonight" picking apart the Secret Service and never mentioned David Ellison, the man about to own his network.

The timing made the silence loud. Ellison's $111 billion merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, the company that owns HBO, closes on Tuesday, Oct. 6, Variety reported when it caught the skip. The combined company will be called Skydance, the Globe reported on Oct. 3. Oliver has needled the Ellisons on his show before, Variety noted.

Instead, the main segment covered the history of presidential protection and the run of security failures that, the show argued, have nearly cost President Trump his life. It built to a gag lifted from real life: Homeland Security once hired Michael Bay to make an expensive recruitment ad that aired during the Super Bowl, so Oliver made his own Secret Service spot, with Adam DeVine and Anders Holm of "Workaholics" playing agents who can't do the job.

Oliver's own deal isn't in question yet. He and his team extended their contract to 2027 just before the merger was finalized, Variety reported. The worry is late night's recent history under Ellison, whose Paramount ended Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show," a decision Variety suggests came at Trump's urging. The trade's view is that Oliver may be living on borrowed time.

On Monday, the new owners started answering who stays. Casey Bloys of HBO will be chief content officer of Skydance's streaming business, TheWrap reported, as Ellison and his co-CEO, Ynon Kreiz, named their leadership team. Mark Thompson stays at CNN, and Bari Weiss will run CBS News, with the two networks kept apart.

Others are already gone. Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, who ran the Warner Bros. film studio, are out, and they found out from the press before Ellison ever called them, TheWrap reported. Abdy is said to have told Ellison, according to TheWrap, "Good luck to you. I left you 39 movies."

The cuts aren't finished, either. TheWrap says Skydance has to take $6 billion in costs out of the business while carrying $80 billion in debt. Kreiz, the former Mattel chief, is expected to lead that work. The deal also comes with a government consent decree that puts an oversight board over CNN and CBS News.

Oliver closed Sunday's show with a fake recruitment ad for a federal agency. The next time "Last Week Tonight" is on the air, it'll be on a network Ellison owns.

Source: Variety, retrieved October 5, 2026. Other sources: TheWrap, TheWrap (2).