It came as little surprise that Samantha Bee’s new show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, has one of the most diverse writers rooms in television. A recent New York profile of Bee revealed that she and showrunner Jo Miller cast a wider hiring net for the specific purpose of finding diverse talent; the result is a writing staff that’s “50% female and 30% nonwhite.”
Vulture reports that during a recent interview with Saturday Night Live alum, Ana Gasteyer, Bee offered a fuller explanation of how she managed to do what no other show in late night seems to be capable of doing:
In the entertainment industry in particular, there are seminars and … work groups about creating diversity when, really, the fucking thing you have to do is just hire people. It’s not really the most complicated transaction. Find some diverse people and actually give them jobs.
Full Frontal is also in the planning stages of creating a mentorship program for aspiring writers who are in typically underrepresented demographics and backgrounds (one of Bee’s writers previously worked at the Maryland DMV). Bee said in an earlier profile that the program will be aimed at “pockets of people who don’t formally have access to this world, who want to be in this world, who have no idea how to get there.”
Image via AP.