The visceral — and correct — response to a Samantha Bee-helmed late night show is that it’s a relief to finally have a woman crashing the sausage fest. “Vanity Fair” inadvertently ignited a discussion on gender disparity in October of last year with its cover, “Why Late Night Television is Better Than Ever,” which featured 10 tuxedo-clad men candidly mugging at the camera whilst toasting half-full glasses of bourbon. The photo meant to elicit excitement about where we are but only served as a reminder of how far we have left to go. Like with the Miss America Pageant or ads in which half-naked models eating cheeseburgers writhe around on hot rods, we all collectively seemed to think, _“How is this still a thing?”_
Bee, in her excellent debut episode of “Full Frontal” on TBS Feb. 8, begins by embracing this initial hook for her show (Her ads had said, “Watch or you’re sexist”). Seated at a table for a mock press conference, the Canadian-born comic fields predictably tone-deaf questions, one of them being, “What did you have to do differently to make this show happen—as a woman?” She smiles and quips, “just a bit of magic,” before we see a darkly lit montage of her crawling backwards, between a ring of candles, like a satanic witch out of a horror flick. The cold open has the acerbic, hard-edged feel of her best work as a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” and sets the tone for a once-a-week diversion that already feels sharper than what her old stomping ground has become.
By the premiere’s end, I had forgotten I was so relieved to have a woman breaking up the boy’s club. Instead I felt overjoyed that we have someone — anyone — capable of infusing a little bit of Jon Stewart-esque outrage into the after-hours politics-skewering circuit. The big three talk show hosts — Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel — all mock those in power, but do it with an amiable niceness and charm that makes the attacks lose some of their venom. That is certainly not Bee, who was one of the fiercest interviewers to ever appear on the Daily Show, able to deride subjects in front of their faces without blinking. Her TBS program sizzles with that same fervor. Take, for instance, the moment she plays a clip of Hillary Clinton putting on her aw-shucks humble schtick during a Democratic debate, saying she never imagined she would be here. The joke is obvious — Clinton, who likely has fever dreams of losing the presidency, is lying. But Bee refuses to spew out a simple one-liner, instead turning to camera B with her voice amplified and lights flashing, as she roars in the role of Hillary, “ANOINT ME YOUR GOD!”
Throughout her first two episodes, Bee maintains this sarcastic, smarter-than-thou tone in mocking presidential candidates, puritanical dress codes for female politicians and the panicked reaction amongst conservatives to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Bee is in the zone with these stand-up monologues, bristling with confidence and bursts of cable-approved profanity. It will be interesting to see if she decides to break from this more with pre-recorded bits, and though she’s great at delivering jokes, I hope she does.
For my money, one of the most LOL-worthy, shareable moments so far came in the form of a faux-documentary, “A Jeb in Winter,” about the cringe-worthy depletion of the once-promising Jeb (!) Bush campaign. Narrated by someone who sounds suspiciously like Werner Herzog, the clip follows the youngest Bush brother at speaking events before mild crowds, all scored by a melancholy piano. It puts his weary campaign into a hilariously bleak context, and the interviews are all gold (One kid compares Jeb to a glass of milk — not particularly exciting, but solid).
In her follow-up episode Feb. 15, Bee deploys an even stronger digital short, which shows her going to Jordan to visit with Syrian refugees. Dubbed “The People We’re Incoherently Yelling About,” it intersperses harmless chats with seemingly pleasant people alongside footage of Republicans losing their over the “Islamization of America.” Bee knows the truth alone is funny, but the touches she adds to get across the conservative stance — which includes random flashes of a little girl crying on a rollercoaster — further illuminate the insanity. With “A Jeb in Winter” and now this, along with consistently fiery monologues, it’s become clear that Bee is unrivaled when it comes to late-night snark.
That much could be surmised from how she dealt with that _Vanity Fair_ cover five months back. In the midst of VF’s PR poop-storm, Bee tweeted out that same testosterone-filled cover photo with her own image photoshopped in. Except her head was actually plastered onto a strapping pegasus, naturally, with lasers shooting from her eyes. The caption: “BETTER.”
Late night is undoubtedly better off with the voracious Bee in it. And it has little to do with that extra X chromosome.
