‘Full Frontal With Samantha Bee’: Behind the Scenes of Five of the Show’s 2016 News Hits
Conventional wisdom suggests that it generally takes about a year for a new late-night talk show to find its footing. Good thing that Samantha Bee apparently doesn’t listen to conventional wisdom. From the moment it debuted in February, the Daily Show veteran’s new solo series, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, has elbowed its way to the forefront of the late-night conversation with a potent combination of incisive social commentary and razor-sharp satire.
Behind the scenes, though, the process of making the series isn’t exactly what you’d call cutting edge. “It’s like a pair of high school kids in their garage making a show,” executive producer Jo Miller half-jokingly tells Yahoo TV. “Sam and I get up at weird hours and are constantly texting each other our frenzied obsessions. My poor writers are used to waking up and reading my obsessions first thing in the morning!”
With 2016 almost (mercifully) in the history books, we asked Miller to pick Full Frontal’s five biggest news-related obsessions from the past year, and tell us how the show put its own distinct stamp on those stories.
The Religious Right
In May, Full Frontal devoted two episodes to the history of the religious right’s rise into a potent political force. One of the most interesting elements of the two-part history lesson was the story of Frank Schaeffer, a filmmaker and former fundamentalist Christian who made several highly influential antiabortion films in the 1970s. He later recanted his views and, on camera, expresses his regret for his early involvement in the movement.
I love the stories where we get to learn about a topic and are able to present all that information. Our senior producer, Pat King, and I are both historians, and we love diving into history. With this story, we got to meet Frank Schaeffer, and he’s now a friend. I certainly knew about the roots of the religious right, and that the movement was in search of a cause and they picked abortion. What I didn’t know was the role of these Frank Schaeffer films. They were wacky, and very well-made cinematically. So the role of that propaganda, and how certain politicians in Washington leveraged that art to jump-start a movement, was fascinating.
And it’s equally fascinating to watch the division of the religious right today, with the cynical Jerry Falwell Jr. political movement that uses religious identity as a political weapon that rallied behind Donald Trump. [But] other evangelicals were horrified; they endlessly lined up behind Ted Cruz, [and] could not stomach Trump on moral grounds. A lot of them, through their missionary work, encounter people of various cultures, and refugees, and immigrants, and people of different countries, and are not xenophobic. So that’s a further division between people who live their biblical faith and people who are primarily politically motivated and wear the evangelical identity like a sports jersey.
Brexit
The U.K.’s controversial vote in favor of exiting the European Union was an early harbinger of a global swing toward more-conservative politics and politicians. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump even labeled himself “Mr. Brexit.”
I’ve lived and studied in Britain, so that country is close to my heart. And Sam is Canadian, which is a commonwealth country. [When Brexit happened], we understood its implications about our own American election in an instant, and really wanted to get that across. The next day, the deplorables came out of the woodwork and started attacking Polish people, Muslims, refugees, and black people who had lived in London for three generations. It was horrible. We looked at that, and wanted to make a plea to America that it was not enough that Trump should lose, but he had to lose in a landslide. We had to show ourselves and the world that America is a country that rejects Trump, and rejects attacks on the most vulnerable. That’s what we were warning about in our Brexit piece, and it’s what we’re watching now. Today I woke up and read a news story about a heroic policewoman in New York who saved a baby from a fire, but also happens to wear a hijab, and she was attacked horribly by a racist on the street.
One of my favorite things about that piece is that we had David Tennant reading Scottish tweets about Donald Trump. Here’s our text conversation [of how that came about]. We had been writing jokes about Sam doing accents terribly, so I texted her to ask: “How’s your Scottish accent?” And she wrote back, “About as good as my Australian accent.” I said, “Maybe we can get Patrick Stewart to do it,” and her answer was, “My agent reps David Tennant. Hold on.” In an hour, we were emailing David Tennant! [Laughs] He was on his way to the Broadchurch set and pulled over to the side of the road to shoot the video with his phone. That’s how our show gets made in a nutshell!
President Obama
It’s rare for a talk show in its freshman season to score an interview with a sitting U.S. president. But President Obama has always had exceptionally good taste in TV. Appearing on Full Frontal’s Halloween episode, the outgoing POTUS discussed the importance of voting and how to talk to millennials.
We wanted to interview him before he left office, so we reached out and got a “We’ll see” in response. Then clearly he was doing all of the shows trying to get his message out to people that voting was maybe a thing they should consider doing. It didn’t work! The president is obviously the most tightly scheduled person in the world, so we flew down to Miami and were squeezed in between the back-to-back obligations he had. But during the time that he was with us, he was present and interested in chatting. He knew that when you talk to the president for the first time you’re s***ting yourself, so he started out the interview slowly, and put Sam and the producers at ease.
With every question we asked, he’d sit there and think for a minute and really consider it in order to give a thoughtful answer, which I loved. When we asked him what the female equivalent of “You weren’t born in this country” would be, he gave what I thought was a really insightful answer. That experience will not come again in my lifetime, I’m sure, [interviewing] a president [like him]. And having met him, one of my first thoughts after the election was that I just wanted to go hug him and Michelle. I felt terrible for them.
Hillary Clinton
While Full Frontal made no secret about which presidential candidate it considered the better choice, the show didn’t avoid taking comic shots at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In its sixth episode, for example, Bee derided Clinton’s controversial comments about Nancy Reagan’s legacy on AIDS. She also took her to task in September for her infamous “basket of deplorables” comment. But as the election grew closer, they settled on a consistent theme: Let Hillary be Hillary.
I had the line about her being the only woman we know who can trip over her own d*** in my head for quite some time. I knew that we’d get to use it — it was only a matter of time. We didn’t use it at the Democratic convention, because it was pretty successful, [but] we knew it was coming. When she did the tone-deaf, overmanaged political responses, we just cringed.
During the campaign, we were learning new things about the extent and type of sexism in our country. When we took our trip through Pennsylvania and wound up at a country fair, everyone we talked to said they didn’t think a woman should be in charge. Even a female mechanic who complained about sexism from her customers said she didn’t think a woman should be in charge because we’re too emotional! I have to tell you, that was a little surprising to me. I’m old, and don’t often think I can be surprised! [Laughs]
We had been working on “Let Hillary be Hillary” for a long time, [taking into account] everything we don’t like about her: her guardedness, her overmanagement, her reflexive self-protectiveness that makes the tiniest things look like scandals just because of the way she behaves. That was part of the episode we aired right before the election, and we were looking at how a woman gets to be disappointingly guarded over time. Women of my generation, and older generations, haven’t gotten over that kick in the gut when she gave Family Circle a recipe for cookies [in 1992]. She started out being an outspoken woman, unapologetically feminist, [who] said her cookie thing, and America took a look at this and said, “Bitch, get back in the kitchen and bake me some cookies.” When that happened my heart died.
Donald Trump
The Presidential candidate turned president-elect dominated news coverage this year, proving too big a topic to ignore. And the Full Frontal crew really would have preferred to ignore him…
Frankly, we preferred covering Ted Cruz. We started covering him before we even had a show, because we couldn’t help ourselves. He was a delight; Trump is a grind. We’re not having fun covering him. You’re welcome, America. We’re miserable! [Laughs] The one thing that we really had fun with was a piece we didn’t even have time to put on the show. It was a mockery of his rumormongering, with different people saying, “Trump can’t read.” We put that on the web and it became a viral thing, which we enjoyed because it was just a silly joke.
[Going forward] we don’t want to drown in our sorrows, because anger and dismay are exhausting for us, and I don’t think that they’re particularly helpful to our audience, who is feeling the same way. If we can break out of that and do something that has a point and gives us a chance to have a lot of fun with footage, it might be a way to save our sanity and help our audience bind their wounds. We get 21 minutes a week, and we’re trying to figure out what to focus on. We got some great field pieces in the works that are in edit right now. Our plan was to go back out into the individual states when Hillary Clinton became president and stop talking about [national politics] so much, because we’ve been ignoring the states and that’s where things happen that affect people’s lives.
Full Frontal With Samantha Bee airs Mondays at 10:30 p.m. on TBS.
Read more Toast of 2016 interviews:
Sterling K. Brown Talks the Power of His 1-2 Punch: The People v. O.J. Simpson and This Is Us
Stranger Things Star David Harbour Reflects on What Really Made the Show a Supernatural Sensation
