Bee brings ‘Full Frontal’ to late night
‘Daily Show’ alum brings sunny sarcasm and a female point of view to late night
Samantha Bee warms
NEW YORK up an already friendly audience at a taping of her final test show Monday, the eve of the Iowa caucuses.
She stands on her shiny new set in a tomato-red blazer, joking (or maybe not) that “half the peo
ple here work at Full Frontal,” her new weekly TBS comedy show that premieres Monday (10:30 p.m. ET/PT) with a dose of the comfortably familiar for fans of
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where she was a correspondent.
Only now she’s running the show, helped by three former
Daily staffers including her husband, Jason Jones, who proudly says, “There’s no one else who can do this better than her” after “12 years learning from the master.”
Even before the unexpected Iowa outcome, Canadian-born Bee, 46, had plenty of jokes about the state’s quadrennial 15 minutes of political fame. (State color? “White people.”)
And afterward, she muses on whether Frontal needs to be different from Daily in an expanding world of nighttime snark.
“Does it have to be? Or can it just be my version of that?” she asks, a version with no desk and no guests. And one that’s run by women, if not exclusively for them, in a genre that’s overwhelmingly male.
“I’m just reading coverage of things in a completely different way.” But “there are certain topics that other shows won’t cover in depth at all.” Take the alarming Zika virus: “It’s a real woman-centered story,” Bee says. “The government of El Salvador has told women not to get pregnant for two years.” For now, she’s missing the key to giving it the
Full Frontal treatment: “I don’t really know how to attack it comedically.”
Key components of the show are the remote segments that were her trademarks at Daily. Among those lined up: The hurdles female military veterans face getting medical care; a Texas abortion-rights case being heard by the Supreme Court; and a trip to a “cultural orientation” session in Jordan for Syrian refugees heading to the U.S. (Her takeaway: “It’s really the Americans who need the orientation about Syrians.”)
Officially, Frontal has a 13week commitment by Turner, though its entertainment chief, Kevin Reilly, says the show is “baked into” his long-term plans. He’ll air Monday’s premiere on five of its networks, and calls Bee “a smart person who knows how to unpack an issue and get laughs out of it. She’s not off-putting; she’s not in-your-face.”
At their old job, says former colleague John Oliver, whose HBO show shares Bee’s studio, “she could get you out of a jam, because she could get laughs out of something that objectively was not a joke. As for field pieces? “She is probably at the very highest end of that skill set. It was always slightly humbling watching her do that.”
Bee won’t ignore politics. But unlike Stewart, “it’s not as much going back in time and figuring out ways they contradicted themselves,” she says. “Everybody is sort of doing that now,” even Fox News during the last GOP debate. “It’s amply covered, and yet if you ignore it, you risk being irrelevant.”
Comedy Central never offered Bee The Daily Show when Stewart left, despite her long tenure. But she’s OK with it.
“I don’t want to do a show four nights a week. Kill me. Oh my God. No thank you,” says the mother of three (her oldest is 10). “If there’s one thing that I do know myself, it’s better for me to build something from nothing than to take over something from someone else who is so lauded,” she says. “This is a better path for me, and I can carve out my own space.”
Starting with the fact that at 10:30, her show isn’t in late night. “We’ll get to have people who are still awake! That will be nice.”
As a woman, “I’m just reading coverage of things in a completely different way.”