The new season of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver premiered on HBO and Max on Sunday. The episode was also released on YouTube that same evening, much to the surprise and delight of fans.

In an attempt to increase the number of members to the Max streaming service, HBO reversed the release sequence from the previous season by moving the primary story of each new Sunday night episode from the following Monday to the following Thursday on YouTube. Fans reacted negatively to the move, which Oliver described as “massively annoying.”

In November of last year, HBO made an exception for the pre-election episode of Last Week Tonight. Shortly after the show aired on the linear HBO network on the West Coast, the primary part of that episode, in which Oliver discussed “the harm of a second Trump term” and urged everyone to vote for Kamala Harris, was made available on YouTube.

HBO insiders emphasized at the time that the rapid YouTube release was an isolated incident. Now it is starting to happen again. Oliver had been pushing for the reversal decision, which was made after data analysis showed that there was no discernible rise in Max viewership following the implementation of the delay, according to sources.

Only the primary plot of Last Week Tonight episodes will be made available on YouTube, as has always been the case. Oliver focused the whole show on Donald Trump’s first month in office and the activities of Elon Musk, whom he referred to as “a parasitic freak,” and his DOGE team, making last night’s edition an anomaly.