Adam Conover wants to put to bed a question he still gets all the time: What happened to his truTV series “Adam Ruins Everything”? So he took a page out of John Oliver’s book and blamed parent company AT&T.
“We were a hit for that network. We were the second biggest show that network had, depending how you crunch the numbers,” Conover said on Tuesday in a TikTok video. “The Carbonaro guy did pretty good too.”
That’s Michael Carbonaro of “The Carbonaro Effect.”
“But we did really, really well — so why would they want to end the show?” Conover continued. “Well, here’s what happened: In 2018, the giant phone company, AT&T, bought Time Warner, truTV’s parent company. When they did that, they did what they always do every time there’s a big mega-merger — they laid a ton of people off. A hundred people were fired from truTV including the head of the network, the vice head of the network, the entire programming department, the marketing department. Basically everyone in the entire building was let go.”
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Conover and crew (internally) turned their season finale into a series finale. A month later, “Adam Ruins Everything” was officially canceled.
“I’m doing fine, by the way,” he added.
Conover said the AT&T-Time Warner merger “turned what used to be an awesome, thriving TV network into a graveyard that just airs old ‘Impractical Jokers’ reruns.”
“So if you want to know what killed ‘Adam Ruins Everything,’ monopoly capitalism did,” he said. “That’s the murderer.”
Readers can watch Conover’s video at the bottom of this post.
Subsequent Conover tweets then got into Microsoft’s pending $68.7 billion acquisition of gaming studio Activision Blizzard.
“Solidarity with the workers at Activision/Blizzard who have been through hell the past few years and woke up to this news today,” he wrote, referring to the widely reported culture issues at the company. “Keep fighting.”
And: “In the meantime: One of the few bright spots in government the past year has been federal regulators hinting that they might once again be interested in enforcing our anti-trust laws. Here’s hoping they take a good strong look at the [Microsoft/Activision Blizzard] merger.”
We’re not going to let Conover end our story on a downer though. Not when the below anecdote is so available.
“Fun fact I didn’t have room for in the video: I was told that one of the departing workers graffitied ‘AT&T Ruins Everything’ on an ‘Adam Ruins Everything’ poster as they left what was once the truTV offices,” he tweeted. “Never felt more honored to be defaced.”
Conover has a new show, “The G Word,” coming out on Netflix later this year.