Attack Of The Bee-Hive

When Samantha Bee and Jo Miller launched Full Frontal just over a year ago, the world was a very different place. But the show’s star and showrunner are ready to take on these precarious times (and a certain Twitter-loving president) with humor, skepticism, and a healthy swig of bourbon.

- Lorraine Berry

Last fall, as the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election rolled in, there was a lot of crying in the Full Frontal writers’ room. The TBS show, led by host Samantha Bee and show runner Jo Miller, has one of the most diverse talent pools in late night—of its eight writers, four are female and three are people of color—and the results felt personal. “Not because we thought that Hillary [Clinton] was going to solve all of the nation’s problems,” explains Bee. “But just because there was a predictability or stability, and we knew we had lost it all.”

The new uncertainty transformed into dread, says Bee. By 10 p.m. on election night, champagne the Full Frontal staff had put on ice hours earlier was no longer appealing—and their collective dread has formed the show’s tone during the past few months. While some comedians jokingly celebrated the election’s conclusion (“Donald Trump got elected president, and my job just got easier for the next four years,” quipped Conan O’Brien in November), Bee and Miller pushed the Full Frontal team to channel their pain and anger into a steady stream of episodes centered on the Trump administration’s shortcomings, to put it mildly, and subsequently enjoyed the show’s best-ever ratings. This February, viewership was up 167 percent compared with the same time period in 2016; Full Frontal with Samantha Bee ranked as late-night television’s number-one show with adults ages 18 to 34 at press time, outperforming Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.