From an idyllic wilderness, Full Frontal returns with some stark pandemic truths
With many of the late-night shows announcing their impending return to the airwaves come next week, viewers have been prepped for the new normal. Stephen Colbert, Jimmys Kimmel and Fallon, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, Conan O’Brien, and more have been putting out low-tech, responsibly remote segments from their couches, hallways, bathtubs, rec rooms, and other bathrooms, while Full Frontal host Samantha Bee has set out for the great outdoors, testing both her capacity for frontier living (mixed) and woodland isolation from her leafy (and occasionally snowy) upstate New York home. But life and broadcast schedules wait for no host, so Bee brought back a stripped-down but more or less full version of Full Frontal on Wednesday.
Proclaiming that she’s doing her part by shooting this edition of Full Frontal from a doctor-recommended distance with “a safe minimal crew of my husband,” former Daily Show colleague and The Detour star Jason Jones, Bee launched into several signature field pieces (you get it). Counting on her similarly sequestered graphics team to slot in those necessary over-the-shoulder clips of actual COVID-19 expert Dr. Anthony Fauci being driven to doctor-unadvised face-palming by Donald Trump’s murderously irresponsible press conference pronouncements (not to mention a little animated bluebird that perched on Bee’s finger), the host ably summed up the “scary as shit time” we’re all going through. You know, what with the exponentially escalating ravages of a deadly virus being combatted by a greed-head former reality show steak huckster whose “every decision” according to Bee, “puts us in more danger than the one before.”
Still, it wasn’t all doom, gloom, and subconscious pleas for help spelled out in Scrabble tiles for Bee. Or, wait, it sort of was, as she interviewed one of the courageously diligent doctors on the front lines of the fight against coronavirus. (Donald Trump, hyping up his “war” on the disease, characteristically remains nowhere near front lines of any kind.) Debunking the idea trumpeted by shirtless ding-dongs in Spring Break clips who boast of their live-forever youthful vigor to save them, the doctor told Bee that a whole lot of the 25-44 demographic that “very rarely ever get hospitalized for anything” are, according to the doc, getting—wait for it—hospitalized for the life threatening and scary effects of COVID-19 that you probably don’t want to know about but should. As Trump and the GOP start testing the waters of asking Americans just who they love more—Grandma or their stock portfolios—and hinting at a homicidally fast return to business as usual in order to shore up Trump’s reelection chances and ego, Bee fought back against the nakedly in vogue conservative idea that “some people matter less,” concluding that “we need to stop treating the working class like their lives matter less that CEOs—in short, we need to start treating people like people.
On that last front, Bee is urging viewers to donate to her doctor guest’s charity GETUSPPE.ORG, which seeks to provide medical workers with the protective gear they somehow aren’t already copiously provided with. Meanwhile, Bee is promoting Food Bank For NYC, because people, you know, need to eat and stuff. And, on a sole hopeful note, Bee showed how at least the furry community is doing a pandemic right.