HBO’s two late-night shows, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and Real Time With Bill Maher, will begin airing new episodes starting as early as March 29, according to Deadline. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, numerous television and film productions have been halted, such as Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Additionally, all late-night talk shows have halted the production, with networks airing reruns in their time slots. Both HBO late-night series last aired new content on their respective March 13 and March 15th dates and the network has released a lack of news about their continuation until today.
Since halted production, late-night talk show hosts such as Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Jimmy Kimmel, and others have released short monologues or mini-episodes on their Youtube channels. However, Oliver and Maher’s programs have not distributed new content since the postponement of their production schedule.
There’s no new show tonight, so we’re repeating last week’s episode, which is still… y’know… pretty relevant. Will we be back next week? We hope so! We’re trying our hardest! Can you hear that? It’s us, knocking on wood!
— Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight) March 23, 2020
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and Real Time With Bill Maher will air new episodes Sunday, March 29 at 11 PM ET and Friday, April 3 at 10 PM ET, respectively. The new episodes will be taped from hosts’ homes and will join other late-night series in producing in this format for their future episodes. In addition to these HBO series, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah has begun airing episodes from home earlier this week, as well as the TBS duo of Conan and Full Frontal With Samantha Bee who plan on resuming original programming shot from home. The announcement for the late-night series returning to their television format is a sign for future normality during this pandemic.
This is pretty much what I wld have said – funnier, of course! – if we were on last night. Maybe not this month, but soon we’re gonna have to ask some hard questions about if the cure harms and can even kill more than the disease. https://t.co/yIyqN5pXpz
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) March 22, 2020