The best way to describe season 7 of Last Week Tonight is “very 2020.” The season was dominated by COVID-19 and systemic racism, including the ways that systemic racism has made COVID-19 more devastating for Black and brown communities. (Of course, the season also featured a fair number of Adam Driver jokes and a preoccupation with rat erotica – John will be John.) As with The Daily Show, I’m grateful that John and co. found a way to pivot to filming the show remotely, because I’ve needed Last Week Tonight’s insights this year. Here are my top stories from the season.
Season 7, Episode 8 – “Coronavirus IV”
This story focuses particularly on COVID-19’s impact on workers, looking at how the pandemic exposes and exacerbates a bevy of existing cracks within numerous American systems. Whether it’s furloughed workers making hundreds of fruitless calls per day in a desperate effort to finally reach a human being who can process their unemployment claim, or the “hero” essential workers who are lauded by CEOs while forced to work in unsafe conditions and denied hazard pay, we see how an enormous swathe of working Americans are screwed here.
Season 7, Episode 10 – “Coronavirus VI: Testing”
Oh man. Comparing the U.S. COVID response to South Korea is old hat at this point, but the comparison between the U.S. and South Korea’s testing numbers early in the pandemic is just lamentably disparate. In looking over the many, many ways we’ve been unable to get it together on testing (not least of which being the president who’s actively tried to discourage testing,) John handily demonstrates how thoroughly the U.S. has hobbled itself since the beginning. As a result, we’re left flying blind and our best hope of equipping ourselves for the fight is like navigating “the wild west.” Sigh.
Season 7, Episode 16 – “Coronavirus VIII: Prisons & Jails”
This is such a heartbreaking episode. As evidenced by their multiple appearances in this post (as well as the use of Roman numerals,) COVID-19 is a major feature of the entire season, and the main stories they do on it are always both tragic and rage-inducing, but I find this one particularly so. Prisoners have so little autonomy that there’s hardly anything they can do to protect themselves, and the few measures the prisons seem to bother to provide are often half-assed and/or cruel. The footage of prisoners filming conditions on the inside using contraband phones just makes me want to scream on their behalf.
Season 7, Episode 20 – “U.S. History”
This is a really strong story. I’ve learned elsewhere (not to mention experienced for myself) about America’s shoddy track record on teaching about the history of race in America, but as usual, John lays it all out in a way that’s incredibly thorough, wide-ranging, and most of all, urgent. He looks at the white kids who aren’t given appropriate historical context to race in the U.S., which in turn obscures their view of race in America now, as well as kids of color (particularly Black kids) who are forced to sit in classrooms and learn this distorted version of America’s past. John recognizes that the past informs the present and we can’t truly make the present better if we don’t acknowledge and reckon with that past.
Season 7, Episode 21 – “Juries”
Rage-inducing, like so many of the show’s stories on the criminal justice system. John comes armed with numerous receipts, first bringing stats to demonstrate how all-white juries are harsher on Black defendants than white defendants, and then showing the multifarious ways by which juries are kept as white as possible. From the supposedly-“neutral” process of selecting prospective jurors from a pool to prosecutors’ targeted focus in crafting the jury they want, Black prospective jurors are boxed out every step of the way. As with so many topics involving systemic racism, part of what makes it so horrific is how overt much of this stuff is, and yet the people invested in maintaining this system still have the gall to pretend their actions are racist.
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