John Oliver on the Secret Service, and how ethernet cables became a security issue
Viewers keep returning to the agency's pay and overtime, a recruitment ad and one Princess Diana joke that made the studio audience groan.
LastWeekTonightStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 2,522,584 views a day, 18 times a normal first day on this channel (139,870).
The Secret Service: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
"The Secret Service: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)" is the main story from Sunday's show, cut from the episode and posted on its own. In it, John Oliver looks at an agency the description calls "in a worrying state." He also takes on a question nobody expected to hear on a comedy show: how ethernet cables became disturbingly crucial to the nation's safety.
In 22 hours it passed 2.4 million views. A new upload on this channel usually ends its first day nearer 140,000. The full episode, "S13 E25: Midterms & The Secret Service," opens with Republican ads ahead of the midterm elections and went past 700,000 views in its own first day, also well beyond the usual. A short teaser for the segment, which jokes about a lost favorite jockstrap, came in behind both.
The subject is a change from the week before. That week the channel's shorts were about Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro, his son Flavio and Lula, ahead of the country's election.
Most of the conversation under the new video is about working conditions. Viewers pick up the segment's details on salaries, mandatory overtime and money spent on recruiting. A recruitment ad shown in the piece gets its own set of jokes, and so does the agency's frat culture. The line people quote most, though, is a joke about Princess Diana, and several commenters say the studio audience let out a groan they had never heard on the show before.
Others point out Rob Riggle, the comic actor and former Marine officer, who joins in the jokes about the agency. One viewer who sat in the audience for the taping wrote about how friendly Oliver and his crew were.
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- Channel
- LastWeekTonight
- Subscribers
- 10,200,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 12,638,596
- Channel views, pace per day
- 786,186 (on a normal day: 1,534,466)
- Video published
- October 5, 2026
- Video views so far
- 2,413,253 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 2,522,584
The numbers
The figures show how far a single main story can run past the channel's usual first day, with the full episode well ahead too.
💡 Test your knowledge
Before he launched Last Week Tonight, John Oliver was a correspondent on which show?
Oliver joined The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2006 and was a correspondent there until he left to start Last Week Tonight on HBO in 2014.
