John Oliver

Yeah, because I think what we were trying to do was stretch the form of it.

And it took us a while, but I think that Indian election was such a gift for a first show because to my mind, there was nothing more interesting

happening in the world that week than the Indian election.

The largest exercise of democracy in human history.

And it was nowhere on American television, which was just wildly insular.

It felt nothing is happening in America that was more interesting this week than what is about to happen in India.

That was almost a gift.

From there, we had to kind of get out of our system, that rhythm from The Daily Show, where you're just reacting.

Yeah, reacting.

And...

We did one show that wasn't very good, I remember, about immigration early on that felt like we'd done like a 10-minute headline that was really just... You could have kind of done it on The Daily Show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was stuff you'd already seen.

It didn't feel good.

Luckily, we had... I think it's that I'd shot an interview with Stephen Hawking that we did after that.

And so that was the main thing that people thought about.

For us, the real...

lesson that we learned that day was that what we wanted our show to be about was showing people something they hadn't seen before.

Because it felt like then you're actually using the extra time that you got.

Otherwise, it feels like cheating.