Trump Has Made Some TV Great Again

by EG March 31, 2017 @ 5:21 am PST

The presidency of Donald Trump has been good for ratings for cable news of all stripes, for comedy shows — for pretty much everything, except for Trump's own Celebrity Apprentice!

BuzzFeed News has made a comprehensive list of all the programming that's gotten a so-called "Trump bump," using data to make sense of different demographics the networks sell ads to, as well as Live + Same Day ratings (people who watch a show live, or almost live), Live + 3 Day ratings (viewers who watch a show within three days), and Live + 7 ratings (audiences who watch a show within a week, duh, you get it by now). It's in no order whatsoever!

HBO's Season 14 Real Time with Bill Maher and Season 3 of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver both concluded a few days after Trump's surprise victory over Hillary Clinton — unfortunate timing for those who would have wanted to know what Maher and Oliver thought of Trump's transition.

Upon their returns — Real Time on Jan. 20 and Last Week Tonight on Feb. 12 — there's certainly been an appetite for the topical HBO shows. Maher, as is his tradition, presents balanced panels, with a Jake Tapper here, a Louise Mensch there (and, disastrously, Milo Yiannopoulos somewhere else, whom Maher was ill-equipped to debate).

Oliver, from his ranting perch, has mostly been constructing sophisticated arguments against Trump and his surrogates, naming the brewing Russia scandal "stupid Watergate," while also employing his signature bawdy asides, such as calling Attorney General Jeff Sessions “the unfortunate result of Dobby the house elf’s one-night stand with a Confederate flag” (with an accompanying image that's hard to forget). But Oliver isn't all Trump all the time: He also flew to India to interview the Dalai Lama.

HBO counts programs' cumulative audiences, meaning on the HBO channels themselves, on-demand, on HBO Go, and on HBO Now. By that measurement, Last Week Tonight is averaging 5.9 million viewers, up from last season's 5.6 million. And Real Time is drawing 5.6 million viewers per episode, which is a million more than its previous season, and, according to HBO, its largest audience since its first season in 2003 (when none of those digital platforms existed).