Samantha Bee Has No F—S Left To Give

Late night’s queen of the Trump takedown gets grilled by LENA DUNHAM on her White House Correspondents’ Dinner special, the ‘raging negativity’ of politics and the fraught new normal: ‘Every time I turn my phone off something terrible happens’

- Lena Dunham

“You don’t know how much you mean to me,” says Lena Dunham as she opens her arms to embrace Samantha Bee.

For the Girls creator and many more, Bee’s weekly late night TBS program Full Frontal has become, in the Trump era, a tragicomic feminist primal scream. So Dunham, herself a lightning rod and millennial icon — and surrogate for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign — has come to The Hollywood Reporter offices in Manhattan to interview Bee in advance of Bee’s April 29 Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner special.

Dunham tells Bee that she has been instructed to say hello from Amy Poehler and Amy Schumer, with whom she is on a text chain. But despite their shared New York City area code and professional milieu, Dunham, 30, and Bee, 47 — a married mother of three children (ages 11, 8 and 6) with husband Jason Jones — have not met until now. “My life is super not fabulous,” explains Bee. “I don’t really go out or do stuff.” Onscreen, however, Bee has done a lot of “stuff.” After 12 years on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, in 2015 she left for a deal at TBS that made her the only woman in cable or broadcast late night. (Bee and Jones, also a Daily Show alum, co-executive produce the TBS comedy The Detour, on which Jones stars; he also is an executive producer on Full Frontal.)