“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” debuted in the spring of 2016, right in the thick of that year’s presidential election campaign, so for most of the show’s run it has existed in a national political landscape with Donald Trump at its center. But that’s not the case anymore with Trump out of office — and perhaps as significantly, banned from social media platforms. Samantha Bee is relieved he’s no longer “lurching behind us on the debate stage … I am fully ignoring him for the most part. It’s wonderful.” Watch our exclusive video interview with Bee above.
Trump certainly kept topical comedians like Bee busy over the last few years, but his absence is the “best possible outcome for our show” in addition to being “the best possible outcome for America … I feel like we instantly adapted to a slightly better world, to a world of greater hope, to the promise of crawling, slogging our way out of this pandemic. The whole thing has just been a straight-up improvement, 10 thumbs up.”
Coming out of the pandemic also means easing back into a more typical production format. Bee and her family shot the show remotely for a while, but “Full Frontal” has since returned to a studio setting, though still without an audience. Recently Bee even flew to Rwanda for a field piece that will air on Wednesday, June 30. “I knew that we would definitely want to get out of the studio and out of the office. And we wanted to expand the visual world,” she explains. “So we researched countries that we could get access to, that we could get a travel visa to, that had a good handle on their own COVID … It was a good thing to go. I’m so happy that we went.”
That’s not to say that America and the world are “out of the woods when it comes to democracy. We certainly are not,” Bee adds about the current state of politics and public health. But “fingers crossed that a couple of months from now things will feel even more normal. We can all go to Rwanda together.”
Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?
