Every once in a while, it’s nice to be wrong about something.

When HBO announced last fall that John Oliver, a British comedian I very much admire, would be hosting a weekly show focused on current events, I remember thinking, “That will never work.”

Given that the news cycle is measured in fractions of a second and that “The Daily Show” — Mr. Oliver’s longtime professional home — and “The Colbert Report” both squeeze laughs from daily annotations of news events, where was the runway for this program? Anybody who thinks a weekly schedule built on news is easy should ask the editors of Time, Newsweek or New York magazine. Furthermore, the last time a Brit pointed a crooked finger at American foibles — although Piers Morgan did news, not comedy — it didn’t turn out well.

Yet here we are, at the end of Mr. Oliver’s first season with “Last Week Tonight” — he will return in February — and the show has been a smash, with strong ratings, a dedicated fan base and a series of clips on YouTube that have melted the Internet. He helped drive attention to the debate on net neutrality, and last week, President Obama urged the Federal Communications Commission to stand tall on that basic principle.