Left-wing late-night show host Samantha Bee’s “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” recently got canceled after seven years on air, way past the high of her popularity during the early days of former President Donald Trump’s time in office.
Last week, a spokesperson for TBS described the reason for the cancellation as a “new programming strategy,” reported The Daily Wire.
“As we continue to shape our new programming strategy, we’ve made some difficult, business-based decisions,” the TBS statement read on July 25.
Long before Bee’s late-night show on TBS was done, the TV host’s ratings were nowhere close to any other late night show.
After 7 seasons, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee will not be returning to TBS this fall. We’re so thankful for our loyal audience, our amazing team, and that we got to annoy the right people every week—that there wasn't wrestling or baseball or a very special episode of Big Bang.
— Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (@FullFrontalSamB) July 25, 2022
In 2018, the host’s Nielsen ratings were down 34 percent from the prior year among the coveted age demographic of adults 18-49. When it came to overall viewership, the show was down 29 percent compared to the year earlier.
Bee’s dramatic ratings decline over the last few years seemed to come after the host was forced to apologize for her attack in May 2018 about Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump. During her show she called the former first daughter a “feckless c**t” and more. The comments drew a huge backlash against Bee’s show.
“Let me just say, one mother to another, do something about your dad’s immigration practices you feckless c***,” Bee shared before the episode was removed from the internet. “He listens to you. Put on something tight and low cut and tell your father to f***ing stop it. Tell him it was an [Barack] Obama thing and see how it goes.”
After the comments, Bee started losing sponsors right and left, including one of her biggest supporters, Autotrader. The Wrap noted, at the time, the host couldn’t afford to lose anymore. It happened after her show had lost sponsor State Farm who announced it was taking a break from the show following her Ivanka comment, Variety noted.
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald recently tweeted, Bee’s anti-Trump show was “a feminist legacy as trivial and inconsequential as it was failed and pointless.”
“This program was typically dead last in the ratings for late-night shows, barely attracting an audience size of a mid-level YouTuber,” Greenwald responded to the show ending. “Even the barely-visible Don Lemon has more people watching. This show will be missed by a few dozen liberals.”
Glenn also posted a chart that proves as late-night TV hosts go hardcore left, their ratings suffer. It shows audiences just aren’t tuning in by the millions because late-night TV is no longer a place to escape from the echo chamber of the left-wing propaganda that’s everywhere from news outlets to TV shows/movies and more.
The graphic showed Bee was in 13th place the week of June 13-19, 2022. In September 2021, she was in 12th place in late-night TV when it was announced her show would be renewed. Her June audience of 285,000 paled in comparison to that of Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld on “Gutfeld!” who brought in 1,973,000 during the same time frame.
The show “Full Frontal” debuted in February 2016 and had a lot of buzz at first. But by her third season of attacks on Republicans and then-President Trump, viewers, especially the liberal ones, had stopped tuning into the show for dissenting commentary, Yahoo noted.
“Full Frontal” ratings peaked in the fourth season from 2018 to 2019, when the host was bringing in 4 million viewers per episode, the outlet noted. That was comparable to the numbers the show had from Season 1 and 2 with more than 3.3 million viewers, But by 2020, the show had sunk back to 3.5 million, before falling to a series low of 2.9 million in 2021.
Retired veteran late-night comedy writer, Ned Rice, said that Bee’s show “never really caught on,” per Yahoo.
“I never saw it in the press,” Rice shared. “I never saw Samantha quoted really anywhere, except for [the ‘feckless c***t’ incident]. I don’t think that show made much of an impact. And they certainly gave her a good several years to work to find an audience, but she never did.”
Bee’s show’s cancellation comes as part of the great WarnerMedia Discovery merger reshuffle, which includes TBS, TNT and TruTV, the Hollywood Reporter noted. Bee’s show’s business model was basically anti-Trump and with Trump out of office now for almost two years, the show doesn’t work, the Washington Examiner noted.
If you were to read NPR’s report about the show’s cancellation, it surmised that it wasn’t the comedian’s inability to find an audience or stop attacking anyone that doesn’t push left ideologies.
Instead it suggested Bee’s show getting pulled is an attack on women hosts in late-night and “hints at tough times for women and POC [people of color] in late-night TV.”
However, instead of the host taking a different approach than all the other late-night hosts by mocking the aging, bumbling President Joe Biden, she was more interested in pushing her leftist agenda about why we need abortion and labeling transgender kids issues, “human rights.” There’s simply no difference between Bee’s show and something a person can find on CNN or MSNBC, which people have made clear they don’t want.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.