Late Night Last Week: John Mulaney Returns, John Oliver on Sports Betting, and More
Every week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. In this week’s late night TV recap, John Mulaney returns with his Netflix talk show, John Oliver looks at the omnipresence of sports betting, and Taylor Tomlinson jokes about the FBI’s newfound love of the UFC.
As Michael Scott once reminded us, St. Patrick’s Day is the closest holiday the Irish will ever have to Christmas. Well, today, we of Irish descent, and indeed all citizens of the world, got the greatest gift of all: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced that our hero, our true patron saint, our beloved Conan O’Brien, will return next year to host the 98th Academy Awards. It truly is like Christmas Morning. Checkmate, atheists.
John Oliver Deconstructs our Modern Sports Betting Hell
On his March 16 broadcast, John Oliver tackled one of the preeminent phenomena of our time: the rise of sports gambling. As the always-perceptive host points out, gambling advertisements have quickly infused themselves into, well, basically everywhere.
From the outset of his monologue, Oliver makes his stance clear: he’s not against gambling, especially that which functions more or less as entertainment. But throughout the monologue, Oliver makes the persuasive case for the corrosive nature of this new form of gambling, which, for the most part, now exists in the pockets of consumers, who can easily place bets on nearly every sport imaginable, from the National Football League to Polish table tennis, at any time of day, at a moment’s notice.
Oliver outlines the predatory nature of many gambling companies, who not only gather untold amounts of data to understand their customers, but then employ it to locate those who spend the most, i.e. those who are the most or most-likely-to-be addicted, and target them with special offers to keep them gambling. One company, Fliff, even does some complicated workaround to allow those who are underage to gamble.
“It’s not gambling. It’s a social free to play sweepstakes, with micro-transactions that pay out real cash if you win, available to teens when their brains are most impressionable,” Oliver explained. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Plus, the name “Fliff” is too good for Oliver to resist.
“It sounds like either one of the most innocent things imaginable, like a helpful cartoon chipmunk, or that little bit of flower that’s on top of freshly baked bread,” Oliver reasoned. “Or something so disgusting it has its own Pornhub page with videos like, ‘Stepmom Gressica Shyne gets fliffed by personal trainer and his college advisor, Rod Steel.’”
The upshot of Oliver’s monologue: sports gambling should be legal, but we need to rein it in, just like there are laws against cigarette advertisements and limits on how much alcohol one can be served at a restaurant. If you’re wondering just how pervasive this stuff has got, Oliver played a clip of a 60 Minutes correspondent L. Jon Wertheim, who, in a report on sports gambling, offered a disclaimer that, while working as commentator on the Tennis Channel, he sits behind a desk with a DraftKings on the front.
“That has got to be a demoralizing thing to have to do,” Oliver said. “It’d be like if I told you after all these years that I’d been sitting behind a desk sponsored by the Sackler family.”
“It would make you question some things.”
John Mulaney Returns
Wednesday, March 12 marked the return of John Mulaney to late night. Following his successful stint last year as the host of the six-episode live talk show Everybody’s in LA, Mulaney is back on Netflix with a new weekly version of the show, which will run for 12 weeks under the retooled name Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney. The host explained that the name change is a function of market research that told them that, well, people around the country just do not care for Los Angeles. “After the fires, I said, maybe they’ll like us more now,” Mulaney shared. “So we tested it again and it turns out: no, people still didn’t.”
As our Garrett Martin wrote in his review of the first episode, the new version of the show is mostly similar to last year’s program: “for better and worse.” With a killer new intro and revamped set, the show’s brown and chrome color palette is impeccable, a fine pastiche, blending the good feels of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Unsurprisingly, Mulaney’s monologue remains the best part of the show: in that department, he’s as good as any host on late night. He’s a master of the personal story, which, in this episode, includes some lovely, hilarious anecdotes about his wife, Olivia Munn, and her recent breast cancer diagnosis.
Where the monologue—and indeed much of the show itself, which features appearances from Joan Baez, Michael Keaton, Fred Armisen, and personal finance expert Jessica Roy—goes off the rails is when it gets too meta, when the big joke is that Netflix is letting them do this big, silly show full of mistakes. There was a rawness to the first season that certainly remains an important part of its appeal, but to watch it all play out again here felt a little tired. To carry across 12 weeks, the program must settle in. And with Mulaney at the helm and Richard Kind again at his side (“Like the measles, he’s back in a big way,” the host declared.) they are sure to figure it out.
Michael Kosta Swings By Late Night with Seth Meyers
One of this column’s favorite figures on late night today is Daily Show senior correspondent and rotating host Michael Kosta. On March 12, Kosta joined Late Night with Seth Meyers to talk about his new memoir, Lucky Loser: Adventures in Tennis and Comedy.
Before trying out his material at an open mic night, Kosta was a professional tennis player, topping out at 864 in the world tennis rankings. When Meyers shared that fact, the studio audience laughed, seemingly unimpressed with this actually impressive stat. Kosta, without hesitation, turned to the audience, ready with one of those sarcastic quips that have become his trademark on The Daily Show. “I mean, what was your world ranking?” he asked the audience. “I’m the best tennis player that any of you know.”
Kosta and Meyers went on to discuss the similarities between tennis and stand-up comedy. “In tennis, your opponent is trying to trick you into making a mistake,” Kosta observed. “I’m not saying comedy audiences are like that, but at the very beginning, you know this Seth, at the very beginning, a comedy audience feels like an opponent.”
Taylor Tomlinson
On After Midnight, Taylor Tomlinson and co. cover the zaniest internet trends. It’s great fun. But there is a whole other side of the internet, and it has sort of, well, taken over the government. Such is the black and white cookie of life.
Tomlinson’s March 11 monologue tackled the hellscape in which we now live by talking about FBI Director Kash Patel. Specifically, the host summed up Patel’s plans to use the UFC (you read that right, Dana White’s Ultimate Fighting Championship) to train FBI agents. The Manosphere has gone from shitposting to the halls of the federal government in an even bigger way as part of Trump 2.0.
“What are they gonna do, put tax evaders in a headlock?” Tomlinson asked. She then showed a picture of Patel attending a UFC event, fist-bumping a professional actor by the name of Mel Gibson. “If this picture doesn’t make you feel safe,” Tomlinson said, “you must really have eyes and memory.”
Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He’s been writing Paste’s late night TV recaps since 2024. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.