How Samantha Bee Crashed the Late-Night Boys’ Club
Which she did, starting with Episode One this past February. “OK, so Iowans chose fist-faced horseshit salesman Ted Cruz as their new prize heifer,” she announced, after skewering both “Hermione Clinton” and “blustery old grandpa” Bernie Sanders — and fashioning a noose onstage. The message – that no one is safe from Bee’s disapprobation — and its bare-knuckle delivery (“It’s athletic, it’s sporting; I wear running shoes”) have changed the entire tone of the late-night satire conversation. Where John Oliver is affable/caustic and Jon Stewart indignant/bemused, Bee is quite literally outraged. “She happens to be one of those rare people who is able to see the urgency of things when others may not,” Stewart tells me. “Especially when it’s something that she really feels connected to. She is invested — she’s there for a reason.”
In Bee’s clenched hands, a story about untested rape kits getting thrown out in history’s most fucked-up round of spring cleaning (“Does this rape kit spark joy?”) named names (Georgia state Sen. Renee Unterman, among others) and turned evisceration into a high art (“Are you in the pocket of Big Rape?!?!”). In an abortion segment, she stared down a Texas legislator who insisted that the regulations he’d sponsored were in the interest of women’s safety, and asked, “Have you thought about regulating the safety of back alleys? Because that’s where a lot of women will be having their abortions now.”
What’s surprised almost everyone, including Bee herself, is just how much America has liked this pummeling. When Full Frontal first aired, the country was midway through an election season that’s laid embarrassingly bare our nation’s squeamish relationship to women in power. From the get-go, Bee and her team leaned in to the sexism they knew would accompany a show in which wit is delivered in a higher register, from the tag line “Watch or you’re sexist” to the very first promo, in which Bee turns down a platter of meat (“Actually, you know what? I think I’m kind of done with sausages”) before signing off with a middle finger to the status quo: “And I am female as beep.“
But, really, she’d set the confrontational tone of her show a few months earlier, when a Vanity Fair spread celebrating the new wave of late-night hosts post-David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart and Craig Ferguson featured a gaggle of (mostly white) men in exquisitely tailored suits sipping brown cocktails — or, in James Corden’s case, a juice box. Never mind that Bee’s show (and Chelsea Handler’s, for that matter) had already been announced for 2016. “You know when you can feel your own heartbeat in your ears?” Bee asks, of the moment she first saw that photograph. Within two minutes, almost without thinking, she had responded, tweeting a Photoshopped version in which she had added herself into the picture. As a muscle-bound centaur. With laser eyes. And a one-word tag line: “BETTER.”
The tweet established Bee’s brand; it also went viral. “People responded to it,” says Bee. “And that was the first time I felt, ‘Oh, if a little tweet can electrify our potential audience, there are people out there whose desires are not being answered. There really is a place for our niche show.'”
“We don’t feel like we solved the diversity problem. We didn’t fix racism, quite. I mean, we almost did. We’ll see how things pan out. I’m feeling really good about it.”
More to the point: There is a place for her particular brand of gonzo outrage. “It wasn’t a conscious decision,” Bee says of taking this approach. “I don’t think you could put in a document, ‘The character will be Furious Woman. Just trust me. People will go for it.’ That would have been a really tough sell at the network.” So Bee didn’t sell it; she just put on her cashmere sweater and pearls and told the network to trust her. Then she made the show that she herself would want to watch, one in which “women’s issues” are taken off the sidelines, and boulders are rained down on racism and sexism and any person, institution or -ism that needs a good whopping. Bee shrugs. “I don’t know how we would do it any other way.”