What’s happened with Samantha Bee since the fateful night when she called Ivanka Trump a “feckless c-word” earlier this year? Well, times have been hard. It’s true that she hasn’t lost her TBS television show. She briefly lost a couple of advertisers, but what impact that has on a network like TBS which operates on the margins compared to the alphabet networks is hard to say. She still went on to receive a Television Academy award. So it wasn’t all that bad, right?
Not so fast. It’s really affected her personally. Perhaps it was even a gamechanger. Has she dredged the depth of her soul and found a path to the light? (Washington Times)
The former “Daily Show” correspondent, who now host’s TBS’ “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” told The Hollywood Reporter that she wasn’t well-prepared for the “level of ferocity” that came with insulting the first daughter in such a manner.
“It affected me a lot,” she said in an interview published Thursday. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it. We had a scheduled vacation around July 4, and it was a time of reflection.”
“I do think that being a part of the outrage machine is an inevitability now,” she added. “That’s a reality everyone has to grapple with — not just me. The level of ferocity is something I hadn’t quite experienced up to that point, but I assume I’ll go through it again. Maybe I’ll be better prepared next time. I think we handled it well, but it was a pretty steep learning curve.”
Wait… so she took the 4th of July break to consider this and came to the conclusion that she was a victim of “the outrage machine?” Or does she mean that she jumped into the shark pit of the outrage machine and wasn’t prepared for people to hit back? It’s difficult to imagine a situation where somebody can go on the air and do the type of blatant attack dog comedy Bee delivers and not eventually expect some blowback.
On that subject, why would she be singing the blues about this supposedly negative attention? TBS isn’t totally unknown but it’s not a network where you deliver Seinfeld level ratings. Getting most of the nation talking about you, even for something this crude, isn’t exactly a negative. And she already knows that her own community won’t be holding her feet to the fire because she managed to land seven Emmy nominations this summer. If she’s crying, it’s all the way to the bank.
Let’s take a moment and relive the apology Sam Bee originally offered.
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How did this “affect” Sam Bee in any meaningful way in terms of growth? If anything, it’s only bolstered the loyalty of the only audience segment that would actually tune in for her show. Sorry to say, but I’m not going to be losing a lot of sleep over how much this has affected her life.
And yes, since we received some complaints last time I wrote anything about Samantha Bee, I should include the standard disclosure that I did actually do a show segment with her on The Daily Show once and spent an afternoon hanging around with her. She was nothing but nice when off camera.
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