Samantha Bee debuts first episode of ‘Full Frontal’ with faux press conference
As you may or may not have heard, Samantha Bee is in fact a woman — the only uterus-having person currently hosting a late-night comedy series, not to mention one of the only female human beings ever to scale this particular portion of Male Privilege Mountain.
It was only natural, then, for her very first episode of Full Frontal to begin with a faux press conference in which Bee was asked — over and over and over, in only slightly different words — what it’s like to “break into the boys’ club” as a “female woman.”
Her answer? It took “hard work, a great team, maybe just a little bit of magic” — which led immediately into a trippy, semi-horrifying cutaway sequence that pictured Bee hamming it up with a literal coven of witches. It was weird. It was self-assured. It was very Samantha Bee.
And it was also the last time that Full Frontal‘s maiden voyage really dwelled on the lady elephant in the room — though Bee’s decidedly female point of view will obviously continue to inform her comedy, as will her status as a woman in a male-dominated industry.
So that’s the New Hampshire Primary. You watch enough debates, and you start to feel sorry for podiums. #SamanthaBee
— Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) February 9, 2016
Instead, the first episode of TBS’s latest series spent the bulk of its run time digging into the absurdities of the 2016 presidential primaries. And in doing so, Bee and her staff left no candidate unscathed.
Bernie Sanders got tagged as a befuddled grandpa who mistook Hillary Clinton as a waitress at the last Democratic town hall. The former Secretary of State herself was burned as “Hermione Clinton,” an ultra-ambitious gunner who might just have made a deal with the devil. Marco Rubio was pegged as the first candidate “to exploit his kids for a photo opp.” Donald Trump was dubbed a “sentient caps lock button.” Ted Cruz probably got the worst of it: Bee called him a “fist-faced horseshit salesman,” and she did it with a smile.
Which is key: At no point did Bee’s relentless assault feel cheap, or tired, or even particularly mean-spirited. Her gleeful delivery helped land every barb without the sting ever overwhelming the comedy.
It’s an especially neat trick when you compare Bee with her closest late-night analogue, HBO’s John Oliver — another Daily Show alum who’s tasked with staying topical even though his show also airs only once a week.
Oliver is great at what he does — but when he’s really digging into an issue, his stridency sometimes overpowers his comedy. Bee doesn’t seem like she’ll have the same problem, perhaps because her sense of humor has always been goofier and more absurd than her former colleague’s. (That opening “witches” bit recalled the best part of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show premiere, a set tour that eventually devolved into a wonderfully weird bit of business about hummus.)
At no point did watching Full Frontal feel like sitting through a lecture delivered by a likable but stern professor. Instead, Bee came across like the cool substitute who swans into school, shakes things up, and exits stage left before the credits roll — but not without leaving changed hearts and minds in her wake.
Oh, and not without taking the class on a very special field trip. Bee has said that she gravitated toward a weekly format particularly because the reduced schedule would give her more time to venture out of the studio and make the kind of field pieces she did so well on The Daily Show.
Those bits were always Bee’s forte. And even though she didn’t appear in the field piece that capped Full Frontal‘s debut — a deep dive into the particular abyss that is Jeb Bush’s campaign in New Hampshire, narrated by a guy doing a Werner Herzog accent, which was alternately funny and sad — the segment clearly bore her fingerprints.
Future episodes will show Bee herself escaping her desk-less set for exotic places like Jordan and… a VA hospital. If the premiere is any indication, though, Bee is very much in her element even when she’s got nothing but a studio audience and some damning footage to bounce off of.
Is it great to finally have a female voice in late night? Well, yes, of course it is. More importantly, though, it’s great to have Samantha Bee’s voice in particular — and after a premiere this strong and confident, you can only imagine where she’ll go next.