Quite a bit has changed since the comment to which you are responding. Happy New Year, for one, and in 2009 Sam Bee didn’t have her own show.
I still like me some Bee.
I like Sam Bee, too. (Even if she’s canuck;))
Samantha Bee is hilarious!
I like Zom Bee!
I just hope Gary Johnson was able to sneak in a little tongue when he dazzled SB with kissing her on the rock-climbing wall.
I agreed with the OP before her show. I like her considerably more now.
“…Hanes…! …Hanes…!”
Yeah, that’s not happening…
The problem with Full Frontal is that the show goes for very quick, “sound bite” humor that panders to a very specific audience and doesn’t really challenge that audience to consider any deeper implications other than that a contingent wealthy, mostly white men are treating women and minorities like second class citizens, which should be news to exactly no one. Her presentation is deliberately shrill (she’s said as much) but is also self-conscious as hell about it, and on occasion has lacked thorough fact checking or at least complete presentation of facts. Compared to the post-Stewart Daily Show is lacks the more muted and resonant satire of that show, and it doesn’t even approach the depths of the oft-twenty minute or longer exposés that have become a centerpiece of Last Week Tonight, often approaching the threshold of investigative journalism (as much as Oliver stalwartly resists the label) and framed by delightfully immature wordplay and the most artfully clownish skitpieces since *The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
Samantha Bee isn’t shooting for that, or for a broad spectrum of America. Her audience is primarily like-minded feminists who are looking for a weekly dose of recreational outrage, and she’s pretty good at that. (Some of her “correspondents” are funny as hell, though.). So, if you don’t like Bee, that’s more or less an intentional exclusion on her part, since you’re probably not her key audience.
Stranger
“Should be” and yet we have weekly and probably daily reminders about treatment of women that require outrage, just as Larry Wilmore’s show found daily reminders of treatment of minorities for which outrage was the best counterfoil. You can’t get wronger than thinking that because outrages are common and unending they shouldn’t be raged against as if they were the first.
I somewhat agree with the rest of your post, though I think more of the show than you do. The first couple of episodes left me lukewarm at best, but her post-election shows were fine. The interview with Glenn Beck was simply superb.
I never liked Bee on The Daily Show, because as I said above they didn’t know how to write for her. The new oral history of TDS confirms that Bee liked her correspondent, out-of-the-studio, pieces the best because she could control them. Her current writers enable her to be angry, almost to Lewis Black levels. That’s new. She always had to be a bit ladylike on TDS. Women in comedy and outside it never were allowed to spew bile in ways that were commonplace for men. She’s changing that, and I think it still makes many people uncomfortable.
Oh, understand that I’m not saying the outrage is unjustified or misguided; it’s just repetitive. If that’s your thing to enjoy outrage about, then she definitely headlines the show for you. But if you want more breadth or depth on a wider variety of topics, she has sparse offerings. And she certainly doesn’t aspire to Oliver’s “Look, whether you’re for or against [this issue], you need to be aware of [outrageously stupid position that some public figure has taken],” schtick. Oliver’s coverage on the hypocracy of politicians who advocate voter ID laws to prevent fraud while literally committing voter fraud in their legislatures was nothing short of brilliant, and I can’t point to anything on Full Frontal that even approaches it.
Stranger
I like and enjoy Mrs Jones’s work for the most part. Yes she preaches to the choir and adopts an indignant and shrill tone, but often the things she says are worth getting angry about. When she (with some regularity) overdoes it, she ends up sounding like a lousy schoolteacher. See her “why I am voting for Hillary” bit.
As for Oliver, his denials notwithstanding, he is doing journalism. Most of his writers and researchers are journalists and he himself intented to become one, until he got into comedy while at Cambridge.
Well, he’s presenting journalism (typically developed by other sources, although his fact checking team often ends up putting together some original research as well), albeit in a manner that is consistently more accessible and pointed than, say, 60 Minutes, and certainly better than essentially anything you see on CNN. He goes beyond the sound bite level and while he typically presents a stance on an issue (particularly DeWalt ladders), he presents enough criticism to consider the issue from different points of view. His segment on the scandals of Clinton and Trump was literally better than anything else I’ve seen on the topic, and while he earned some amount of criticism from the political left for even daring to criticize Clinton (and amusingly, some people apparently didn’t grasp that the “Swiss File Transfer Scandal” was a story that the show concocted just to demonstrate how amenable the public is to accepting yet another Clinton scandal without even basic skepticism), his skewering of Trump, from his eponymous foundation to his fraudulent “university” should have been adequate to convince anyone to revisit their convictions on a “anyone but Hillary” mentality, punctuated by comparison Clinton as a cookie with a dozen raisins to Trump’s bushel of raisins. (For what it is worth, I find some of Oliver’s “self-deprecating expat Englishman” schtick and improv sensibilities somewhat tiresome when repeated over and over, but the punchlines on his stories and his switching from humor to serious when skewering public figures for hypocracy makes up for it.).
But Oliver’s audience is limited (and probably also mostly falls in a pro-liberal or at least rational skeptic camp), and as Oliver pointed out on a segment on journalism, there is a desperate need to support good investigative journalism at all levels of society and governance, especially local newspapers that cover municipal and state government that is generally overlooked by national media, and to assure independence in journalism from promotional media (especially “native advertising”). Oliver uses comedy very effectively to make a point, and is unafraid to dedicate twenty or even thirty minutes to a story and then return back to it, but he’s not a replacement for the kind of in depth investigative reporting that is the hallmark of the heydays of good print media.
Bee is fine at what she does, but what she is doing is almost purely entertainment, without enough depth to ask whether there are legitimately alternative sides to an issue, and the tone that endears her to one segment of the population alienates others, a fact that she seems perfectly fine with. Whether you find her funny or not probably depends on how close you fall to her target audience.
Stranger
Whonow?
Some sort of joke based on the fact that she’s married to Jason Jones.
I think my favourite bit of them together was a Daily Show segment about the 2010 Census. She was interviewing Robert Groves, then Census Director, about the issues he encountered in his job (paranoia, mainly) and she and Jones acted out a bit where Groves rings their doorbell and they behave like a solidly white-trash couple, quickly starting to make out in front of Groves, who took it all in stride.
Oh yeah, Jason Jones. The guy who doesn’t have the same last name as Sam nor does he have his own show to host.
Jason Jones stars on The Detour, which just got picked up for a second season.
He and Bee created it, and wrote the pilot and several other episodes. Both shows were pitched to TBS as a deal for the two of them. At the time (2014) nobody knew that Full Frontal would take off. They were ready to leave TDS and everybody involved took a chance.
FFS I am trying to point out that it is pretty disrespectful to refer to someone as “Mrs. Husbandsname” if they did not choose to take their husband’s name upon marriage, especially so if the woman is famous in her own right and doesn’t need the coattails of her less-famous husband to achieve things like have and host her own show using her own actual last name.
Sorry I should have womansplained that better in my initial post. :rolleyes:
You got all that from Mrs Jones?:dubious::rolleyes:
What exactly were you trying to convey by referring to Ms. Bee as “Mrs. Jones”?