A few days ago, Samantha Bee was filming a segment for her TBS late-night series, “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” when she encountered a complication she had never dealt with before.
“There was literally a screeching hawk, circling up in the sky,” she recalled, speaking from her home in upstate New York where she and her family have been sheltering in place — and which has become the de facto soundstage for her TV program.
So, Bee turned to her makeshift crew — her husband and executive producer, Jason Jones, and their three children — and delivered an unusual direction.
“We had to hold for hawk sounds,” she said. “You have to be OK with whatever nature provides. This is really uncharted territory for any of us.”
In the days since the coronavirus pandemic forced them into hiatus, the late-night comedy shows are gradually coming back. This week, many of them returned to their familiar broadcast time slots, but in radically different, minimalist forms.
Gone are the lavish studios, elaborately produced field segments and cushy face-to-face conversations with celebrity guests. Instead, the hosts are delivering their nightly monologues into iPhones from home and conducting their interviews by video conference.
Now that their shows are up and running, the people behind them say their continuing challenge is to provide viewers — for whom television has become one of a few remaining outlets for information and fresh entertainment — with a sense of comfort and continuity while commenting on events that have turned increasingly dire.
“We’re in a weird space,” said Trevor Noah, the host of “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. “It feels like the end of the world, and it’s not, but we also cannot treat it like nothing is happening. So we do have to find that balance.”
Most of the late-night shows, which are produced in New York and Los Angeles, recorded their last traditional episodes around March 12, as social-distancing and self-quarantining guidelines were being adopted in those cities. Their casts and crews went home for a long weekend and contemplated next steps.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The New York Times