TBS Cancels Full Frontal With Samantha Bee After 7 Seasons

TBS has canceled Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, as the show becomes the latest casualty following the Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The cable network confirmed the news to Adweek, saying that the decision to end the show—which ran for seven seasons—comes as the company continues to shape its new programming strategy. "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, will not return to TBS," a TBS spokesperson said. "We are proud to have been the home to Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and thank Sam, and the rest of the Emmy-nominated team for their groundbreaking work. We celebrate this extraordinarily talented cast and crew and look forward to exploring new opportunities to work with them in the future." Full Frontal also confirmed the news, saying the series wouldn't be coming back. "Samantha Bee is honored to have hosted the Emmy award-winning series Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS for seven seasons, but the show will not return to the network this fall," a spokesperson said in a statement, adding, "Bee made television history in the late night space, paving the way for female voices in what has traditionally been, and continues to be a male-dominated landscape. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee consistently broke barriers with Sam and her team boldly using political satire to entertain, inform and empower viewers, while embracing critically underrepresented stories, particularly about women." The series released a statement on Twitter acknowledging its fans, its team and the fact that it "got to annoy people every week." https://twitter.com/FullFrontalSamB/status/1551607482388303874 The news may be surprising to fans, as Full Frontal was a constant critical darling and a staple of award shows. The series—the only weekly late-night show hosted by a woman—had been nominated at the Emmys for four consecutive years from 2017-2020 for Outstanding Variety Talk Series and recently earned a nod for Outstanding Short Form Nonfiction or Reality Series. Another merger casualty Despite the accolades, the show is just the latest casualty in TBS programming following WarnerMedia's merger with Discovery in April. For example, TBS also axed dating competition The Big D weeks before its scheduled premiere in July, and earlier this month Nasim Pedrad's critically-adored series Chad was pulled from the schedule ahead of its Season 2 debut. In many ways, the writing has been on the wall for TBS' live programming as the newly merged company looks to cut costs, and shift its originals focus to HBO Max. Brett Weitz, who was GM of Turner networks TNT, TBS and truTV since 2019, exited around one month after the merger, signaling the company's new strategy. The departure also came two weeks after Warner Bros. Discovery opted to halt development on original scripted shows across TNT and TBS. Full Frontal With Samantha Bee stood out among late-night programming. The series constantly took on controversial topics, including abortion, the Jan. 6 hearings, the pandemic and voting rights thanks to Bee's distinct voice and comedy. Samantha Bee was Adweek's TV Creator of the Year in 2016 for launching Full Frontal and also graced Adweek's cover in 2018, telling us about being a new voice among the largely male-dominated late-night shows. "I really only wanted to make a show that I would like, and so that’s what I did," Bee said in 2018. The Late Night Format Was Broken. So Samantha Bee Burned It to the Ground