For the first twentysome minutes of the first episode of his new half-hour HBO show, John Oliver seemed in danger of bombing. Then he trapped General Keith Alexander, the recently retired head of the National Security Agency, on camera, and made him sit through a series of NSA rebranding suggestions that included a kitten called Mr Tiggles and, simply, “the Washington Redskins”. 
 
 The host gleefully turned the screws on the spy. The general soldiered on. The live studio audience, watching the segment on tape, roared and applauded. 
 
 Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is the future of John Oliver, if there is to be one. The former correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart won laudatory reviews last summer when he subbed in the host’s chair. Now Oliver is trying to convert his popularity into bigger stardom, a half-hour at a time, every Sunday night for a contractual minimum of two years. 
 
 Judging by the first installment of Last Week (tagline: “Breaking news… on a weekly basis”), the host might do better the more he gets out from behind his hard-won studio desk. 
 
 Oliver, 37, began his career as a stand-up comic and was hired on the strength of an audition tape about eight years ago to become a Daily Show writer. He quickly became an audience favorite for his uncanny ability to greet the most glorious examples of on-camera thoughtlessness with a thoughtfully straight face. As a roving correspondent with an “exaggerated” (they tell us) British accent, Oliver interviewed gun maniacs and Tea Party maniacs and Occupy maniacs and many other examples of the indigenous American berserk. Occasionally he broke his straight face to play his other strongest card as a comedian: outraged disbelief. As he tells the gun guy: “Are you fucking kidding me?” 
 
 Oliver’s new show is kind of like his old show, except he’s not in it as much. Which is to say that while Stewart, from the Daily Show captain’s chair, could break up his riffs on politics and the media by pitching it to John Oliver, John Oliver apparently has no one to pitch it to, and so he ends up talking too fast and too much and sounding not quite like the himself we know. 
 
 On Sunday, Oliver opened with a Daily Show-style recap of wack and wacky news that, for its scattered laugh lines, kept feeling like it was about to end but would not. He did Cliven Bundy. He did the Vatican. He did Oregon wasting almost $250m to build a health care website that never worked (first applause line of the night: “That has got to be a bitter pill to swallow for the people of Oregon. Or it would be, if they could get the pill, which they can’t, because their shitty website is broken”). He did presidential politics. He did Indian politics. 
 
 Indian politics? In fact, Oliver invested a daring five-minutes-plus on the parliamentary elections in India, which, with 850m eligible voters, is likely to be the largest exercise of democracy in human history, and even more likely, it seems, to be the object of immense indifference to the vast majority of people watching HBO at 11pm. The segment had some good lines. “Let’s deal with Gandhi first,” Oliver said to tee up a bit on Indian National Congress candidate Rahul Gandhi. “And I realize it’s not the first time that sentence has been said in a British accent.” 
 
 Oliver’s method is to ridicule the media mainstream for what it fails to cover and for its failures in covering the rest. His India segment on Sunday night did not find this kind of fresh approach. And his pleading at the end – “We should care about this story!”– didn’t help. There were other low points in the half-hour, including an outdated segment about truth in advertising, featuring a cancelled Kellogg’s breakfast cereal ad from “a few years ago”. 
 
 But then Oliver got his teeth into Alexander, the former NSA director, and all was saved. The value of the confrontation was not simply that Oliver made fun of Alexander to his face, although Oliver’s slyly abrasive handling of Alexander was a refreshing change from the glad-handing Alexander usually got in Congress. Oliver also showed himself to be an effective interviewer by coming back at Alexander with a quickness and precision that the former top spy has very rarely encountered in public. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oliver and Alexander 
 
 When Alexander sought to justify the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records by drawing the usual distinction between data and metadata, Oliver cut him off. “That’s not nothing,” he pointed out. “That’s significant information, otherwise you wouldn’t want it.” 
 
 “Is this the argument, then,” Oliver asked, “that to get the needle, you need the haystack?” 
 
 “Well, that’s part of the argument,” said Alexander. 
 
 “Right, but people’s concern, I think,” said Oliver, “is you’re not just taking the haystack, you’re taking the whole farm, and the county, and the state, and you’ve got some photos of the farmer’s wife in the shower as well.” 
 
 Alexander was to come in for still worse (watch the full interview here). The spot culminated with Oliver’s suggestions for ways to rebrand the NSA, because, “as we learned with Blackwater, you do not have to change the substance of anything you do, as long as you visibly rebrand.” 
 
 First suggestion up: the Washington Redskins. “It’s a slightly less tainted brand than yours,” Oliver observed. 
 
 “Yeah, but, probably not a good one to go with,” Alexander said. 
 
 The interview saved the week – and it worked because the host was out asking questions. 
 
 • This article was corrected on 28 April 2014 to state that India is holding parliamentary, not presidential, elections. ||||| Last summer, John Oliver stepped in for Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show effortlessly–so effortlessly that it became almost a foregone conclusion that he would have his own show before too long, for someone. That someone turned out to be HBO, the show Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. And while I’m not privy to the conversations that took place in signing and developing it, the debut suggested that what HBO asked for was: “That thing you did when you filled in for Stewart? We’ll take that thing, a half hour, once a week. Oh, and you can swear.” 
 
 There was no Carlos Danger on last night’s debut–there are new buffoons to kick around now. But the episode otherwise hewed so closely to the fake-news format and Oliver’s past work on TDS that it might well have been called The Weekly Show With John Oliver–an extra, weekend-magazine-length version of what fans have enjoyed on Comedy Central for years. 
 
 That is, of course, not a bad thing at all. 
 
 The first installment of Last Week Tonight was very much a one-man show, the bulk of it taken up with an extended news-desk segment—like Stewart’s, but with room for more segments and more time to build momentum. (It was such a familiar setup that as it went on something felt strange, and I realized I was unconsciously waiting for, phantom-limb-like, the Comedy Central commercial break.) Counterintuitively for a move to a big-budget network, it’s a stripped-down affair, in some ways like a podcast (i.e., Oliver’s The Bugle). 
 
 The fake-cast’s distinctions are its schedule, its length (an actual 30 minutes, not 20-ish with ads), and its host, and Last Week Tonight‘s first outing took advantage of each. Producing one show a week may make last week less timely (as the show’s promos have joked about), but it also lets the staff cherry-pick a week’s worth of news, and they got lucky this time. First, there was the serendipity of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling (“It turned out to be a rough week for unrepentent racists and recording devices”), and the fact that the Sterling comments broke late in the week gave Oliver first crack at them. 
 
 Maybe more important in the long run is that that full half-hour gives Oliver the room to do more than one of those Daily Show-esque deconstructions of news and the media. The India elections segment must have been something Oliver and the writers had been marinating on for a while—he mentioned it to Jack Dickey in TIME’s recent profile—and it formed into a sweeping essay on news-media provincialism, the export of cable-news sensibilities around the globe, and the actual issues at stake in the world’s largest democracy. 
 
 All that came filtered, as it did on Oliver’s Daily Show interregnum, through his sharper tone and his globalist, English-outsider perspective. (“Let’s deal with Gandhi first–and I realize this is not the first time that sentence has been said in a British accent.”) Oliver is verbally nimble and able to deliver a joke, but he also, more often than Stewart, is willing to voice genuine passion over his subjects. Here HBO’s content guidelines come in handy: in a segment on misleading food marketing, his response to a claim that frosted strawberry Pop-Tarts will make your kids “rise and shine” was a single, pitch-perfect “Fuck. You.” 
 
 The first newscast did feel simultaneously long and breathless, maybe because there was little to vary it or break up the topic segments. I can understand Oliver not wanting to further mimic The Daily Show with correspondent bits. (He served as his own correspondent, in a pointed interview with former NSA head Keith Alexander about the agency’s image, getting the former chief to volunteer the slogan, “The only agency in government that really listens.”) If Oliver wants to keep the show’s bare-bones format, some more varied taped pieces could work (like the Lisa Loeb parody of a twee Oregon ad for its glitch-plagued health exchange), as might some different desk bits that would give him the change to change up the show’s rhythms. 
 
 But it was a funny, confident start. I, like I’m guessing a few of you, DVR The Daily Show, watching it sooner when there’s a story I can’t wait to hear Stewart’s take on, later when there’s not. For now, I’ll gladly add Last Week Tonight to that pile and watch to see if it becomes essential. In which case, your Sunday TV glut just got a half-hour longer. ||||| The fear with Last Week Tonight is that it’s The Daily Show except once a week — a staggered timeline that would rob the basic news-punning format of its intrinsic topical punch. John Oliver’s new show has the familiar rhythms of the show that bore him: Description of news item, comical montage of actual news networks covering said news in an increasingly hysterical fashion, follow-up punchline. Oliver has been with The Daily Show since 2006; he’s one of the longest-serving correspondents, behind Stephen Colbert and the eternal Bee/Jones double act. The first episode of his HBO series didn’t stray far from the Stewart mothership, stylistically. He might be on a premium cable network, but he actually swore less than Stewart, who has made a running joke out of Comedy Central’s basic-cable bleeps. 
 
 But the hope with Last Week Tonight is also that it’s The Daily Show once a week — and that the aforementioned staggered timeline could result in a half-hour of television that is simultaneously tighter and more ambitious, that the extra production time leads to sharper gags but also the ability to present more context. The whole comedic style of The Daily Show has become an essential part of the news landscape; just look at Ronan Farrow Daily, a fascinating and horrific nominally “real” news program which is sort of like The Daily Show written entirely by smart people who don’t realize they aren’t funny enough to write for The Daily Show. 
 
 So Last Week Tonight had plenty of funny throwaway lines. (About besieged Clippers owner Donald Sterling: “He’s like a walking ‘Before’ photo!” About Pope Benedict: “It cannot be easy to be the fourth most popular pope in the room, especially when two of the popes are dead.”) Oliver created a short viral-bait video about the collapse of the Oregon healthcare site, featuring Lisa Loeb angrily singing to Oregonians: “You Stupid Oregon Idiots/You Human Pinterest Boards.” 
 
 But what really grabbed me about Last Week Tonight was the long segment in the middle about the upcoming India Election. Oliver chastised the American media for its complete inability to cover the biggest election in human history; but Oliver also managed to come up with a handy rundown of the important facts. It wasn’t dry (a press photo showing Rahul Gandhi earned him the nickname “The Indian Han Solo”) but it also didn’t shy away from the not-immediately-farcical aspects of the election (frontrunner Narendra Modi’s possible role in the 2002 Gujarat riots.) 
 
 This whole segment felt very different from the typical Daily Show news rundown. There were clips from BBC news and from a New York Times video. Oliver seemed genuinely passionate about the issue, and passionate about the idea that people should care: “We may be throwing state dinners for this guy.” To generalize rampantly, The Daily Show makes fun of how the media covers the things it covers. At its best, Last Week Tonight seemed more focused on angrily criticizing the media for what it doesn’t cover. 
 
 You got the same vibe from a later segment, focusing on the Supreme Court Case of Pom Wonderful v. Coca Cola. Out of a dispute between a kamillion-dollar company and a kabillion-dollar company, Oliver created an elaborate tangential riff that led in several different directions. There was historical context, with court documents dating back three decades; there was a brief history of fraudulent claims on cereal boxes (Cocoa Krispies help “support your child’s immunity!”); and there was a final social media call-out to viewers, sending them to the show’s websites to download stickers that Oliver loudly insisted they not put on cereal boxes. 
 
 If I’m talking about The Daily Show so much in this review, it’s because that show is very clearly Oliver’s spirit animal. This isn’t The Colbert Report, which broke away decisively from its inspiration just by virtue of Colbert’s farcical persona. Last Week Tonight ended by leaving the studio and going to a pre-taped interview — in Daily Show terms, Oliver is both host and correspondent. 
 
 But more often than not, Last Week Tonight suggested the sharpest possible version of its inspiration. Interviewing Keith Alexander, the former NSA Director, Oliver managed to get in some solid questions about the much-despised agency’s practices. But he also suggested possibilities for rebranding, including The Washington Redskins (“a slightly less-tainted brand than yours”), adorable little pet Mr. Tiggles, and an attractive internet-boyfriend dude named Trevor. Insanely, Alexander played along: At one point, he suggested that a motto for the NSA could be “The only agency in government that really listens,” which is funny and also Orwellian. 
 
 The set of Last Week Tonight looks like a lot of late-night sets: John Oliver sat at a desk in front of a fake skyline. But something about Oliver’s fake-skyline caught my eye. It’s composed of recognizable monuments from cities around the world: The Washington Monument, the Taj Mahal, the Empire State Building. The buildings are weirdly more detailed than they have to be, more colorful than the usual late-night backdrop-silhouettes. At its best, the whole of Last Week Tonight felt the same way. The format might be familiar, but there’s more detail, a greater sense of context. 
 
 I’m not sure the world needs another late night show, or another political-comedy show. And 11 PM on Sunday is a strange time for either (although you could argue that it’s a savvy programming move, now that Sunday has become The Night We All Watch Too much TV.) Last Week Tonight should feel like an experiment. But Night One felt almost fully-formed, as if Oliver has spent his Daily Show tutelage making a list of everything that works — and everything he wanted to do just a little bit differently. 
 
 GRADE: A-
– John Oliver's new HBO show debuted last night, and it featured possibly the most aggressive interview anyone's managed with former NSA Chief Keith Alexander. Almost all of Oliver's questions were barbed ("What would you like Snowden to know right now, other than significantly less?"), and sometimes he descended into outright mockery. ("You do understand that 'collect everything' is also the motto of a hoarder?") The segment ended with Oliver suggesting the NSA re-brand itself "Mr. Tiggles," an adorable cat in a boot, or "The Washington Redskins," which Oliver described as "a slightly less tainted brand than yours." Asked which he'd go with, Alexander (who generally weathered the interview with equanimity), suggested people vote on it. Opening up Oliver for his final gag: "At long last, Americans are being allowed to vote on something to do with the NSA." Here's what people are saying about the debut: That interview segment saved an episode that "seemed in danger of bombing," writes Tom McCarthy at the Guardian. "The value of the confrontation was not simply that Oliver made fun of Alexander," he writes. "Oliver also showed himself to be an effective interviewer by coming back at Alexander with a quickness and precision that the former top spy has very rarely encountered in public." While the Daily Show is clearly "Oliver's spirit animal," this show "suggested the sharpest possible version of its inspiration," writes Darren Franich at EW. It was "as if Oliver spent his Daily Show tutelage making a list of everything that works—and everything he wanted to do just a little bit differently." James Poniewozik at Time appreciated Oliver's "sharper tone and his globalist, English-outsider perspective," which showed itself in a "sweeping essay" in India's election and the lack of coverage it was getting in the US. But the show "did feel simultaneously long and breathless, maybe because there was very little to vary it." Oliver might need a few more taped segments, or to get himself some correspondents of his own.