Late-night television lives or dies on next-day YouTube views. What increasingly feels out of place amongst prestige dramas and reality TV slots comfortably into YouTube's often sugary, always kaleidoscopically weird video landscape. The key to success, producers and hosts have determined, lies in optimizing for the Internet's taste.
But while James Corden—rightfully—gets lots of love for his Late Late Show Carpool Karaoke segments, no one should be surprised they're popular. They're videos staring bold-faced names (coming soon: First Lady Michelle Obama!) set to a pop-music soundtrack—they're like cat videos with humans. Politics, on the other hand, is tough. It takes a certain kind of chutzpah to get that widespread traction with deep-cut commentary. And this political season, one person is proving she's got that kind of swagger to spare: Samantha Bee.
Bee's show Full Frontal, which just received an Emmy nomination for its outstanding writing, dropped its latest gem last night. A walk-up for the Republican National Convention, the clip is everything Bee does right: humor, bluff-calling, and the kind of one-liners comedians high-five themselves for thinking up (see: calling Newt Gingrich "the Republican Littlefinger").
Bee has been doing this since her show launched earlier this year. She doesn't traffic in—or get traffic from—easy, viral LoLs. Bee's version of Jimmy Kimmel's YouTube-friendly "Mean Tweets" franchise is having women (herself included) read the horrible, often threatening things said to them on the Internet. And this election cycle, it doesn't seem like a stretch to think, will only give her better material to work with.
That's what happens when life gives you Monday night on TBS—you go to the Internet or you go off the air. In fact, in a still-rare move, Bee has made her full show completely web-accessible without the need for a cable subscription, both on TBS's website and on YouTube. It's a move that has made the show watercooler-worthy even for people who forgot TBS was still a network—and it's made Bee a part of what's shaping up to be a doozy of a post-convention home stretch.
*Full Frontal'*s closest cousin is probably John Oliver's Last Week Tonight. And granted, it's a minor miracle that John Oliver consistently gets four-ish million people to watch 20 minute videos about infrastructure or debt buyers. But while #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain was one of the best Internet moments of the year, it made the takeaway of an otherwise serious fact-checking exercise a goofy line that's more meme than call to action. Oliver can pound the table only so long as he's smirking.
Meanwhile, Full Frontal is at its best when tackling harrowing topics with pure (witty) rage.
And that's where the true success of *Full Frontal'*s segments comes from. They all contain the one thing people go to the Internet to find: angry populism. If YouTube is a spectrum, Nyan Cat is on one end and purple-faced, livid vloggers spitting into their webcams are on the other. Full Frontal is so refreshing because it manages to harness the (often problematic) appeal of the latter and package it in a way that's informative, sane, and funny all at once.
The praise for Full Frontal too often focuses on Bee as a scrappy lady sticking it to the patriarchy. (Such things happen when women deliver any piece of information, especially an opinionated one—it automatically gets heard through the filter of her femaleness, as if her perspective has to be inextricably tied to her gender.) That's not to say she and her team aren't doing their part in kicking sexism's ass, but to only give it credit for that is far too limiting. Full Frontal is smart because it's well-researched and insightful. So is Samantha Bee—the fact that she is "female as fuck" has nothing to do with it. And now, the whole Internet knows it.
