The Late Night Format Was Broken. So Samantha Bee Burned It to the Ground

With a match in her hand and a mischievous smirk on her face, Samantha Bee is getting her inner pyromaniac on. She’s in the middle of a photo shoot in a loft not far from the Lincoln Tunnel in New York, and it’s a fitting visual, given that, since launching Full Frontal on TBS three seasons ago, Bee has pretty much burned down the nearly all-male, mostly white late-night format.

For a half-hour each week, the woman who Sen. Elizabeth Warren said “is more than a comedian—she’s an instigator and an advocate” fires off brilliant insults and observations touching on everything from sexism to social injustice. Her debut show featured a segment on female veterans. In another, she lambasted Kansas state Sen. Mitch Holmes, the man behind a women-only dress code at the state capitol, in a segment she dubbed “Elected Paperweight of the Month.”

Dispensing with the usual fawning celebrity interviews, instead Bee, a Toronto native who cut her teeth on The Daily Show, has taken her “comedic investigations” on the road, highlighting Syrian refugees, Russian trolls and child labor on Kentucky tobacco farms. In March, Full Frontal aired an hour-long special, The Great American Puerto Rico, putting a spotlight on the hurricane-ravaged island. Turning political lemons into lemonade, Bee has also transformed her potty-mouthed rants into action: Her Nasty Woman T-shirts raised $1 million for Planned Parenthood. In Puerto Rico, Bee set up a T-shirt manufacturing facility to raise money for the Hispanic Federation. “It felt very patriotic to me,” she says.

While hypocrisy is Bee’s main target, no one is spared her acid-tinged wit. During last year’s upfronts, she introduced the president of TBS, Kevin Reilly, saying here was someone who has “truly defied the odds: a white male, Ivy League graduate who rose to the top and now runs a TV network.”

A ratings hit, according to Nielsen, the show averaged over 1.2 million total viewers last year. Full Frontal has garnered eight Emmy nominations (and a win for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special in 2017) and was just renewed through 2020.

Here Bee shares her thoughts on changing late-night TV, gender and diversity in media, branding opportunities and creating the show that she wanted to watch.

Adweek: Before you came to the U.S. you were working for an ad agency, is that right?
Samantha Bee: Yes. I worked in the print shop part of the agency, so I wasn’t a copywriter or anything—and I was terrible. I’m so glad that I don’t work there anymore.

Did working in advertising inform your worldview?
It taught me what I don’t know for sure. It’s a good life lesson in a sense that you shouldn’t try to be president, if you don’t know what you don’t know. There are certain jobs that we’re probably not qualified to do.

When you auditioned for The Daily Show, the story goes, they were having trouble finding a woman that they thought was funny.
Well, I think that they were having trouble finding a woman that they thought was right for the show. They definitely were looking for something really specific, which if I can translate for myself, someone who was funny but also seemed seasoned, someone who could credibly look like a grizzled reporter and I was that person. My experience in comedy made me grizzled.

How so?
I was in a female sketch comedy troupe, the Atomic Fireballs. It was very do-it-yourself. It laid a lot of groundwork for what I do now. When you do comedy, sketch comedy, you don’t do it for money. You truly do it for love. And also, it’s plucky. You have a can-do attitude and you’re writing for yourself and you’re creating and learning every time.

Continue Reading

Click for more from this issue

This story first appeared in the May 7, 2018, issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.