Oliver, as far as I can tell, seems to feel obligated to bring the funny only with entertainment guests. He's been pretty straight with the authors, analysts and public figures.
If the Extended Interviews are any reasonable measure for Oliver's style, they are more serious, if not harder-hitting, than Stewart's. I'd put Tom Brokaw's interview up there with Gillibrand's in terms of asking pretty direct questions of someone (who deflected them as expertly as you might imagined). I doubt Stewart would have taken the same approach (for better or for worse). David ________________________________ From: PGage <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2013 2:14 PM Subject: Re: [TV orNotTV] John Oliver Kisses, then Kicks, Kirsten Gillibran's Ass On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 9:25 AM, Joe Hass <[email protected]> wrote: I haven't seen said interview, but do you think it would've been different had Jon Stewart been in that chair? My sense is that Stewart would have raised the same issue with her, but not nearly as directly as did Oliver. Stewart, partly for comic effect, but also I think also partly to handle his own anxiety with uncomfortable encounters, tends to preface a lot of his more confrontational questions with a battalion of qualifications and parenthetical observations. What particularly struck me about Oliver was how he just came directly to the point with his question (I repeat it here because I like the way he did it so much): "Help me understand the relationship between banks and politics, because on the Venn diagram of that, you are right in the middle. You were the number one recipient of money from Goldman Sachs in 2011 to 2012 for all sitting congressmen. JPMorgan was your number two corporate donor over the last five years. What I deeply want to know is, what do you have to do for that? What is required of you for that money? Because it makes me uncomfortable." To be clear, he did not get any better of an answer than Stewart would have gotten. But, to the extent that TDS, absurdly, not only satirizes how ineptly television journalists usually do their job but also on occasion models how to do it better, Oliver's questioning of Gillibran was maybe the best I have seen in the history of the show. -- - -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
