Bee keeps her passion
‘Full Frontal’ host steps into leadership role
The outspoken host of TBS’s newssatire show, “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” arrived on the job in 2016 after spending almost 12 years at “The Daily Show.” By November, “Full Frontal” was matching “The Daily Show” in the ratings. Managing a team was something Samantha Bee had never done before, so she had to learn fast, as she explained at the Fast Company Innovation Festival late last year.
Q: You had a long career before hosting your own show. What was it like stepping into a leadership role?
A: “I didn’t expect to have to think so much about leadership! At the beginning, it was just me and (head writer and showrunner) Jo Miller and (executive producer) Miles Kahn, and we would just laugh and send each other crazy emails. We still have a pretty tight staff, but when you’re trying to create a comedy show, which is a tremendous amount of work, you actually have to manage people, and think about their lives, and make their lives livable, and think about their feelings, and manage their relationships. That was very new to me and has been the greatest learning curve. I don’t think I always succeed at it, but I always am trying to do better.”
Q: You have a blind hiring process, which has resulted in a very diverse writers’ room. How does that work?
A: “Most shows now do. I think we moved the needle on that even further. We did a lot of outreach. You have to call people and say, “Hey, who do you know who is not working professionally but is a professional-caliber writer? Who do you know who has promise?” It’s not like an open call that you put at the back of the New York Post. You have to kind of know somebody. And because it was blind, we didn’t know your gender, we didn’t know anything about you. We felt that was a very fair way to receive submissions. You can’t just hire people who are exactly the same as you. It enriches your life to bring people into your workplace who aren’t a carbon copy of you and your experiences.”
Q: How do you take those different points of view and funnel them through this one lens, with you as the host?
A: “If (writers) have a particular passion, they need to find a way to pitch that story that communicates that passion, and then we’ll be attracted to it and we’ll want to tell that story, too. Letting people explore the things that they are truly interested in has been extremely fruitful for us. I think you feel that on the show.”
Q: What lessons did you take away from ‘The Daily Show’?
A: “I developed a confidence over the years. TBS has never tried to squash our voice. They’ve never told us to modulate our tone. Never. But (early on), it was a big topic of discussion: ‘How will your show be different from “The Daily Show?”’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, I just know that it will be.’ Because I see the world differently.”