Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, the massively acclaimed and long-running HBO program that won best talk show at each of the last four Critics Choice Awards ceremonies, has been pulled from Critics Choice consideration this cycle. The news comes after the organization behind the show, the Critics Choice Association, attempted to reclassify it as a comedy series, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Critics Choice nominations are determined by CCA nominating committees, and the CCA’s TV nominating committee recently decided that only shows that “involve conversation” should henceforth be eligible for the best talk show honor. Apparently, this was born out of a desire to keep Critics Choice categories in line with Emmy categories.
It’s true that the TV Academy, in 2023, split into two its best variety talk series category, which Last Week Tonight had won every year since 2016 (to the annoyance of folks associated with other talk shows). The resulting categories were best talk series and best scripted variety series. The former included shows like Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which “a significant portion of the running time consists of unscripted interviews or panel discussions,” even if they also include “scripted elements and other aspects of a variety series such as monologues, musical performances, etc.” Meanwhile, the latter went to shows like Last Week Tonight and NBC’s Saturday Night Live that are “primarily scripted or feature loosely scripted improv and consist of discrete scenes, musical numbers, monologues, comedy stand-ups, sketches, etc.,” even if they “occasionally feature unscripted elements.”
However, the CCA copied only half of what the TV Academy did. It narrowed the sort of programs that could be eligible for its best talk show prize, but it did not create a new category for the shows that no longer met that definition (ostensibly because it couldn’t create a new category after the submission deadline), leaving shows like Last Week Tonight in something of a no man’s land.
People associated with Last Week Tonight are frustrated that the change in eligibility requirements was never put in writing or shared with them prior to the submission deadline and that the only solution they were offered upon being told that the show was no longer eligible for best talk show was to enter it for consideration in the category of best comedy series. For that award, it would be competing with scripted programs such as FX’s The Bear, ABC’s Abbott Elementary and HBO’s own Hacks. Instead, they elected to withdraw Last Week Tonight from Critics Choice consideration altogether.
Both HBO and the CCA declined to comment for this piece, but I’m hearing that the CCA leadership recognizes the awkwardness of this situation and will be re-evaluating its categories ahead of the next awards cycle.
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