If you’ve found yourself screaming into the void over the fact that “HBO Max” was turned into “Max,” only for Warner Bros. Discovery to go “our bad” and change it back again — congrats: You now have something in common with John Oliver, whose ongoing beef with his corporate overlords continues to make for supremely entertaining television.
On Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, Oliver tore into the streaming service’s identity crisis with the kind of gleeful venom normally reserved for coal barons and FIFA officials. And in true Oliver fashion, he somehow connected it all to the Trump White House trying to strong-arm the Associated Press into calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. “It can take time for people to adjust to a stupid name change,” Oliver deadpanned, before launching into a rapid-fire montage of just how stupid such things can go.
HBO’s streaming identity has, of course, included such auspicious past brand names as HBO Go, HBO Now, HBO Max, Max (sans HBO), and now a return to HBO Max. The different names materialized on the screen during Oliver’s monologue, as he riffed: “Sometimes, hypothetically, before we can get used to one dumb name, some genius comes along and only makes it dumber — then, somehow, it gets dumber still! Before inexplicably going back to the stupid thing it was before.”
And just when you thought he was done, Oliver turned his gaze to the Warner Bros. Discovery upfront presentation from last week, when WBD’s marketing chief Shauna Spenley actually teased Oliver’s inevitable rage about the rebrand. During the upfront presentation, they went so far as to project a giant image of him face-down on a desk, captioned like a cry for help from the marketing team: “We just cannot wait for his hot take on this whole rebrand.”
Naturally, Oliver responded with all the calm of a violently shaken soda can: “Please look me in the eyes when I tell you this: Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do! I’m not going to do it if you want.”
A beat.
“Unless … wait, hold on … maybe you thought baiting me like that would be a good way to stop me from doing it. But on the other hand, how could a company be that smart when they’re the same people that came up with so many stupid fucking names?”
By the way, if you’re wondering why Oliver seems to have made dunking on his own employer into an Olympic sport, remember: This is hardly his first rodeo. When Max debuted, Oliver referred to the move as a “content purge” so extreme that “our business daddy threw the whole HBO out.” The week after, he offered this about the new service: “Hey, do you like HBO but want ads, the Property Brothers, but also don’t like HBO? Max!”
And let’s not forget WBD’s experiment in delayed YouTube uploads of Last Week Tonight, which Oliver described as “massively frustrating” and “not something I was happy with at all.” (Episodes are now back on YouTube post-premiere, presumably after someone in marketing remembered that viewers under 40 don’t have cable, and never will.)
So here we are, once again trapped in a never-ending loop of branding whiplash. First, they gave us HBO Max. Then they took the HBO away. Now they’ve handed it back, more or less proving another bit of wisdom from Oliver: “There’s entertainment in watching a company die.”
