Samantha Bee has been shooting “Full Frontal” from the woods behind her house since March, but even as the U.S. begins to reopen, the TBS talk show isn’t rushing back to the studio.
“Unlike a lot of other shows, we don’t own our space outright,” Bee said during a Television Critics Association panel on Thursday, noting that “Full Frontal” is different from other late-night shows in that it only airs once a week. “We use our studio for a very short period of time in a week, and a lot of other shows come and go.”
“At moment, frankly, our studio is just not open. Our offices aren’t open,” she said. “And now that we don’t have a large audience, and we probably won’t have a large audience for the foreseeable future, the question is what type of space do we need going forward?”
Bee said the show’s studio space, which is housed in a large building in New York, would be “a little more difficult” to return to “because we can’t really control the comings and goings.”
Bee has been shooting her show outdoors with the assistance of her husband Jason Jones since the start of the pandemic, a decision she attributed to the natural light. Though such a set-up presents unique challenges like ambient noise from things like cicadas and neighboring chainsaws, Bee said she prefers it to shooting from inside her home.
“I don’t think anybody really wants to watch the entire show from the guest bedroom that my dad sleeps in,” she said.
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