Under new ownership, TBS ― once Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based baby ― has been stripped of virtually all of its original programming.
The latest victim: Samantha Bee. Her Emmy-nominated weekly comedy show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” debuted on TBS in 2016 and has aired 218 episodes. Deadline broke the story Monday.
Deadline said it didn’t help that Bee’s big supporter Brett Weitz, general manager of TNT, TBS and truTV, left soon after the merger this spring.
Warner Bros. Discovery, since taken over by Discovery executives, has decided to cut all original scripted programming from former Turner networks TBS and TNT in favor of focusing on HBO Max, the streaming service. TBS, in fact, has been stripped of almost all original programing outside of sports and is now primarily a repository for hours of repeats of sitcoms like “Friends,” “Young Sheldon” and ‘The Big Bang Theory.”
TBS cut the second season of scripted comedy “Chad” just the day before the second season was supposed to debut earlier this month. It also killed a Damon Wayans Jr. series “Kill the Orange-Faced Bear” before it even was produced.
Bee, who started her career on Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show,” has been one of the few successful women providing late-night comedic social commentary on TV.
Her perspective as a woman came through every episode, covering topics her male counterparts tended to eschew like sex trafficking and abortion.
She also did a few stories focused around Georgia. She highlighted a rape kit backlog in Georgia in 2016, facilitating the passage of a bill which requires Georgia law enforcement to find and count untested sexual assault evidence. In 2017, she gave Stacey Abrams a national audience early in her first Georgia gubernatorial candidacy. In 2018, she flew down to Lumpkin and donated a five-bedroom house to Decatur charity El Refugio Ministry, which provides free housing for families visiting detained undocumented immigrants at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin.
HBO Max doesn’t offer recent seasons of “Full Frontal,” offering just a handful of episodes from the first three seasons.
TBS provided this statement: “As we continue to shape our new programming strategy, we’ve made some difficult, business-based decisions. We are proud to have been the home to ‘Full Frontal with Samantha Bee’ and thank Sam, and the rest of the Emmy-nominated team for their groundbreaking work. We celebrate this extraordinarily talented cast and crew and look forward to exploring new opportunities to work with them in the future.”
Bee hasn’t made any comments yet about the news.
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