Last Week Tonight With John Oliver has had a contentious relationship with covering India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Recently, the popular late-night satire show that covers major political events globally had an episode criticising the allegedly divisive politics of the prime minister and his Bhartiya Janta Party as the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections had concluded. However, as per a report in The Hindu, the episode has been skipped from JioCinema, where the show can be presently watched in India, from being streamed this week. There have been no new episodes on the OTT platform for Last Week Tonight since May 19’s episode on ‘Corn’. Last Week Tonight With John Oliver: Hotstar Retains Episode Criticising Disney, Arnab Goswami; but the PM Narendra Modi Segment Is Still Missing.
What’s more, an older episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, where he had earlier criticised PM Modi when the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections were happening, was also taken down, as per the report. An interesting thing to notice here is that the same episode was never listed for streaming in 2019 when Last Week Tonight With John Oliver used to stream on Disney+ Hotstar.
JioCinema has skipped today’s episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The main story from this episode — on the elections — will only be out on YouTube on Thursday. pic.twitter.com/JsSavTJugo
— Aroon Deep (@AroonDeep) June 3, 2024
The episodes of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver also concurrently stream on the show’s YouTube Channel, and so has the recent Modi episode. However, if you are watching the episode in India on YouTube, this is what you would be seeing. Amid Russia-Ukraine Conflict, John Oliver Calls Out Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday’s Episode of Last Week Tonight.
How PM Modi Episode on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver is Seen on YouTube in India
Even though the episode has not officially aired in India, it has been leaked on torrents. People are using those to watch the episode or VPN to bypass the country restrictions to see it on YouTube. John Oliver also seems to have anticipated this, as he had created two fake websites to air the episodes in India.
The two websites where The Last Week Tonight episode on Narendra Modi will be made available to circumvent censorship by JioCinema and YouTube are:https://t.co/Up5kyPdE1ihttps://t.co/Qe5GtGyU5Z
(The production team member who suggested the latter deserves a tip of the hat.)
— Abhishek Baxi (@baxiabhishek) June 3, 2024
However, the links are not live yet on these two sites as well, and will only be live on June 6, two days after the election results for Lok Sabha 2024 are out on June 4.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 03, 2024 07:16 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
