John Oliver Might Bite at New Discovery Bosses: 'No Tastier Hand Than the One That Feeds You'

Great story. TV needs more people like John Oliver.

Variety/Brian Steinberg

John Oliver has a few words for his soon-to-be new bosses at Discovery. And even those may be more than enough.

The HBO host, who launches a new season of the comedy-meets-investigative-journalism series “Last Week Tonight” on Sunday, has for the past several years teased the owner of HBO and its parent WarnerMedia with great relish. “You’re a terrible company. You do bad things and you make the world worse,” he said about AT&T in October. Ever since the telecom giant began working to acquire the former Time Warner in 2018 for $85.4 billion, Oliver has treated the company mercilessly. “AT&T: It’s the top telecom company around –- alphabetically, and nothing else,” he said before the company made its big buy.

No one from AT&T has ever talked to him about the content of his program, says Oliver, and he hopes that continues once Discovery takes control of WarnerMedia sometime over the next several weeks.

“We had absolutely no contact with AT&T, and I could not encourage Discovery more to continue that,” he told Variety in a recent interview. “Leave us the fuck alone.” Of Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who will soon run a merged company called Warner Bros. Discovery, Oliver says, “We do not need to meet each other. We do not need to speak.”