Samantha Bee Opened Up About The Struggles Of Filming Her Show From Home

Bee told BuzzFeed News how she is filming during lockdown from the woods behind her house. Her crew now consists of her children and husband of 20 years.

The journalists at BuzzFeed News are proud to bring you trustworthy and relevant reporting about the coronavirus. To help keep this news free, become a member and sign up for our newsletter, Outbreak Today.


Samantha Bee may be stuck at home like the rest of us, but the show must go on.

Bee returned to television last week with a new iteration of her late-night show, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, for the coronavirus age.

In addition to homeschooling their children together, Bee and her husband of nearly 20 years, fellow Canadian American comedian Jason Jones, are working together to put out Beeing at Home With Samantha Bee, taped from their backyard in upstate New York.

“Having another place to put energy is very helpful to us right now, otherwise you can spend all day literally crying,” Bee told BuzzFeed News' AM to DM in an interview from her home Wednesday.

Full Interview: With “Beeing at Home with Samantha Bee", @FullFrontalSamB is social distancing... out in the woods behind her house. She talks to us about quarantine, homeschooling and has plenty to say about the job Trump is doing

Bee said that the couple has a long history of collaborating, so doing the show from their backyard just made sense. “We have worked together on low-budget stuff all the time," Bee explained. "We’ve duct-taped things, we’ve rigged stuff that should have been impossible."

"Really the two of us doing it together is such a pleasure, this is like going back to our roots," added Bee. "Listen we don’t want to be doing the show in the forest, but if we’re in the forest we can do a show there. And we’re having fun with it."

Bee, however, concedes that the forest has presented some new challenges for the couple.

“We were filming yesterday and we had to hold production because my neighbor was chainsawing logs," said Bee.

A few days before, there was a hawk hunting in the area as they tried to tape. The hawk circled above Bee while screeching loudly. “We had to hold for hawk," she said.

Bee and husband aren't the only couple putting out late-night content from their homes.

For their piece chronicling the return of late-night television, the New York Times spoke to Molly McNearney, co–head writer of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Kimmel's wife. “I was the prop master and camera person and lighting person,” she told the Times. “We didn’t even worry about hair and makeup.”

While Bee said she is enjoying making the show from home for now, she is looking forward to the day when she can go back into a studio with a live audience.

“That's like oxygen to me, hearing people's laughter and claps," she said. "But I don’t mind having the birds and squirrels as my audience for now. Maybe that’s a testimony to how many empty rooms I’ve played in my life."

Skip to footer