John Oliver on 'Last Week Tonight' return, Trump 2024 and the episode that hasn't aged well

John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" is back for an 11th season on HBO Sunday (10 EST/PST), just in time to ramp up for coverage of the 2024 presidential election – or avoid it, as he'd rather do.

The last strike-shortened season explored subjects from cryptocurrencies and farmworkers to homeschooling and solitary confinement, extending a long fascination with America's prison system. And the Emmy magnet last month followed seven consecutive Emmy Awards for best variety talk series with a new eighth top award, scripted variety series, besting "Saturday Night Live."

USA TODAY recently sat down with Oliver, 46, in his show's production offices to chat about the show, Jon Stewart's return and the one segment that hasn't aged well. (Edited and condensed for clarity.)

Question: According to the TV Academy, you now have 28 Emmys. Are you getting tired of winning?  

John Oliver: No. It's very useful as a kind of protective shield.  It's a good way to stay on air. I am very appreciative to the Academy basically having our back, because it enables us to act as if tomorrow is guaranteed, when I know it isn't. 

It's incredible that the show is heading into its 11th season and you've done almost 300 episodes. Have you refined the way you produce the show over the years? 

The whole process had to change. When we started off, we were literally turning up on Day One thinking, 'What should we do this week?' That's just a calamitous way to run a show. So we massively expanded the (staff) so that we could front-load the research for stories to make sure that things are structurally solid (and avoid last-minute reworking). So that's why now it takes six weeks to write a story. You can be more confident with the swings that you're taking because the material is fully backed up.

 Is it getting harder to come up with main topics? 

No, not even a little bit. That has never been a problem, partly now because we want to break down stories into much narrower, deeper sections. So in our first season we did one story just called "Prison." Now it is absurd to think you could deal with the problems of prison in 18 minutes. That's madness. Since then, we've done episodes on prison healthcare, prison labor, prison heat, actually building a body of work over certain subjects that kind of hold each other up.

 Do you have a favorite segment from last season? 

I really liked that piece on railroading, and it was just fun to do a "Thomas the Tank Engine" segment because we hadn't done something like that before. The English (show) is written by a mean old vicar who hated kids, and I remember showing it to my son, who was just so stressed by their eyebrows: they're all angry. The moral is, 'Stay on your track. Don't try and do somebody else's job; don't dream of a better life. Do little things and then die.' It's basically the class system writ large. It is deeply British. This was like my entire childhood, a window into the Oliver psyche. 

Is there a segment that you've done over 10 years that that hasn't aged well? 

I've definitely changed my position on certain stories because of the way things have unfolded. We did a story about Scottish independence, which I was really against at the time. I thought it was a bad idea. Then Brexit happened. Now, I think it makes complete sense. Now I think the idea that Scotland is being denied another referendum, despite the fact that Brexit has changed, absolutely everything feels utterly unjustifiable. So now I would end that piece with a very different point of view.

What fresh hell does the 2024 election cycle promise for the media?

 It's a pretty stale hell, that's the thing. With fresh hell, at least there's that new-car smell about it. For our show, the problem with American elections is that it takes up all the oxygen in the room, and the media both lets that happen and sometimes is more than happy that it's happening. I don't know if you can tap dance the same kind of exciting horse race into life this year. So I'm hoping that we're going to be able to protect at least the main body of our show for the majority of the year from the horse-race elements of the election. Certainly some of the big stories that we're doing will try to be relevant to the various campaign promises.

Didn't you promise to lay off the Trump campaign in 2016?

I still stand by the aim to do that. It's just then he would say something which felt like it was not responsible to ignore, and it became harder to say, 'This week we're going to talk about HOAs' when this week he said he was going to ban Muslims. I'm not saying that still isn't an issue, but you know who he is, both as a candidate and as a president. There aren't many unexamined parts of Trump's psyche. I hoped before that we would be able to silo the campaign from the rest of the show, but that became harder and harder to do as that campaign became more and more toxic.   

Jon Stewart returned as a weekly host of "The Daily Show," your old employer, this week. What do you expect him to bring to the show, and have you spoken to him about it? 

You already know how good he is at this job. It will be really great to have him stabilize things over there, because it's been so chaotic for the last year. From the outside, it seemed like the process they've set up is really just to be able to get anyone in the room and deliver some jokes about the news, whereas he is kind of singularly focused and has an ability to render complicated things very quickly. So I'm excited to see what he's going to do 10 years on with the machine that he built.