Samantha Bee, Jason Jones focus on 'Frontal,' 'Detour,' their unimpressed kids
NEW YORK — They’re husband and wife, both former Daily Show correspondents and now have their own shows on TBS: Samantha Bee’s news satire Full Frontal (Wednesdays, 10:30 ET/PT), and Jason Jones’ The Detour, which returns for a second season Tuesday (10 ET/PT). Bee's weekly show has been growing steadily, and since January has been a close second among young-adult viewers in late night, with President Trump as her special foil. Does that make the show any easier to produce? Not really.
"It's harder, because all of these very important things are happening simultaneously," she says. "It’s like trying to catch a dollar bill in one of those glass cash chambers. Something you felt passionately about on Friday you feel differently on Monday. Every day is reinventing reality."
The Canadian-born Jones, 43, and Bee, 47 — dual U.S. citizens who married in 2001 — are producers of each other's shows, who "eagle-eye" their spouse's work from a distance.
"I wouldn’t be involved in day-to-day minutiae, but I would just come in and say, 'This makes no sense to me,' " Jones says.
"That was really helpful … and so frustrating," replies Bee.
Jones proudly marvels at his wife's new profile — both were part of a Daily Show exodus, along with John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, surrounding Jon Stewart's departure in 2015.
"It always amazes me that she did what she did for 12 years, which isn’t too dissimilar to what she’s doing now, and received basically no attention," Jones says. "And now, people can’t get enough."
Turner Entertainment Networks president Kevin Reilly calls both "just doers; there's no coaching, there's no arguing." Jones writes, produces, stars and has directed Detour episodes, while Bee "stepped on the stage and she was right in the pocket, from minute one. It's just kind of what you hope for, to have two aces in the hole who happen to be able to seamlessly jump in and work on each other's shows and really kind of deliver for you."
Bee's response: "I’m surprised they continue to let us do the show. It’s very audacious, and I think they took a big risk on us." (Full Frontal returns with new episodes March 8).
Detour marks an attempt to mine some of Jones and Bee's personal lives for comedy. They juggle their workloads with parenting three kids, ages 6, 8 and 11, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, though Bee says "we don't seem cool or interesting to them" at home.
"There’s an honesty and openness in our parenting style which you don’t see a lot in sitcoms; it’s sort of glossed over in zinger jokes," Jones says. "We just wanted to create a relationship on camera that evoked how we speak to each other, which is sometimes aggressive. But at the end of the day, there’s no hurt feelings, because you’re an elastic band: you stretch but don’t break. A really thick elastic band."
The series ended its first season on a cliffhanger, as Jones' TV wife (Natalie Zea) was revealed to have multiple identities. ("She plays Jason's wife better than I ever would," Bee says.) But the show, about a fired exec who takes his family on an unplanned and calamitous road trip from Syracuse to Ft. Lauderdale, is mounting a reset for Season 2: the family moves to New York City for dad's new job, and things get even crazier.
"If the first season was an examination of parenting, this season is about a couple’s relationship and how much do they know each other," Jones says.
Bee's next move? An "alternative" competing White House Correspondents Dinner to compete with the real one on April 29, in anticipation of boycotts by celebs and reporters who’ve been the president's most frequent targets. The event, a hybrid of Full Frontal and the traditional affair, will be televised by TBS (and possibly CNN), either live or later that night, Reilly says.
"We just want to have a fun party, and we want to have a chance to highlight some of the journalism we rely on to create the show," Bee says. "We want to pay tribute to some of those people."