The Daily Show has spun off another comic child: Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, a weekly show that debuts Monday at 10:30 p.m. ET on TBS.
That’s right. It’s a girl on late-night television. Sounds unnatural, to be honest. And what next? Will girls start wanting to vote?
Bee says at first she just wants to make people laugh, and toward that end, Full Frontal will operate in the style of The Daily Show itself or the popular Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO.
It will build its comedy on real-life reported stories.
“We want to take stories that we don’t think receive enough attention,” Bee told TV writers last month, “and stab them with the hot poker of comedy.”
One of the first Full Frontal reports will be on a little-reported side effect of the U.S. military officially sending women on combat missions.
That side effect concerns what happens when women inevitably start sustaining combat injuries.
“We did an investigation about whether or not the Veterans Administration would be prepared to receive that huge influx of female soldiers,” said Bee. “Not surprisingly, the answer is no.
“For women who require the services of the VA, the services vary inconsistently. There are hardly any OB/GYNs. At many of the VA hospital locations, there are no words in the computer system for women’s body parts. Not unlike in the world of late night television.”
The VA supply closet also apparently doesn’t stock artificial limbs and other prostheses for women. The Full Frontal report on the VA spends a good deal of time with women who received artificial limbs built for men.
So they are too big and not the right shape, which means the recipient can’t walk properly, which of course, is the whole idea of prostheses.
There’s both absurdity and a serious problem here, and Bee says she’ll be merging those elements the way she, and others, did on The Daily Show.
“I don’t at all feel like I’m a reporter,” she said. “But I enjoy pretending like I can do it. While I was at The Daily Show it became more clear to me that I could follow the stories and passions that I was developing, and that part is very interesting to me. It’s kind of the best part of my job.
“I wouldn’t presume to leave this career and then go into the non-comedy world of reporting. But that is a part of things that I really do love.”
Another upcoming Full Frontal episode has Bee visiting a refugee camp in Jordan. Specifically, it’s a camp at which Syrian refugees are given a crash course in what to expect when they emigrate to America.
“There’s a cultural orientation class that is taken prior to your resettlement,” she said. “Specifically, an American cultural orientation class. It’s about four days long. And we didn’t know too much about it. So we got access to it, and so we took the cultural orientation class or at least a part of it, and we tried to help the refugees orient themselves just a little better.”
For the Full Frontal report, she’ll flip it: “We are going to do a cultural orientation for Americans in order to better receive the Syrian refugees.”
The show will feel familiar to fans of Bee’s work on The Daily Show, she says, but it will also chart its own course.
Asked if she tailored some of her reports there to fit the brand of that show, she said, “Definitely yes. It’s not that [what I would have done] would have made everybody uncomfortable, but there were times when I would have gone more deeply into a subject than others wanted to. We’ll have the opportunity to do that at Full Frontal.”