Conventional wisdom suggests that it generally takes about a year for a new late-night talk show to find its footing. Good thing that Samantha Bee apparently doesn’t listen to conventional wisdom. From the moment it debuted in February, the Daily Show veteran’s new solo series, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, has elbowed its way to the forefront of the late-night conversation with a potent combination of incisive social commentary and razor-sharp satire.

Behind the scenes, though, the process of making the series isn’t exactly what you’d call cutting edge. “It’s like a pair of high school kids in their garage making a show,” executive producer Jo Miller half-jokingly tells Yahoo TV. “Sam and I get up at weird hours and are constantly texting each other our frenzied obsessions. My poor writers are used to waking up and reading my obsessions first thing in the morning!”

With 2016 almost (mercifully) in the history books, we asked Miller to pick Full Frontal’s five biggest news-related obsessions from the past year, and tell us how the show put its own distinct stamp on those stories.

View photos Jo Miller, executive producer of Full Frontal (Photo: Charley Gallay/Getty Images) More

The Religious Right

In May, Full Frontal devoted two episodes to the history of the religious right’s rise into a potent political force. One of the most interesting elements of the two-part history lesson was the story of Frank Schaeffer, a filmmaker and former fundamentalist Christian who made several highly influential antiabortion films in the 1970s. He later recanted his views and, on camera, expresses his regret for his early involvement in the movement.

I love the stories where we get to learn about a topic and are able to present all that information. Our senior producer, Pat King, and I are both historians, and we love diving into history. With this story, we got to meet Frank Schaeffer, and he’s now a friend. I certainly knew about the roots of the religious right, and that the movement was in search of a cause and they picked abortion. What I didn’t know was the role of these Frank Schaeffer films. They were wacky, and very well-made cinematically. So the role of that propaganda, and how certain politicians in Washington leveraged that art to jump-start a movement, was fascinating.

And it’s equally fascinating to watch the division of the religious right today, with the cynical Jerry Falwell Jr. political movement that uses religious identity as a political weapon that rallied behind Donald Trump. [But] other evangelicals were horrified; they endlessly lined up behind Ted Cruz, [and] could not stomach Trump on moral grounds. A lot of them, through their missionary work, encounter people of various cultures, and refugees, and immigrants, and people of different countries, and are not xenophobic. So that’s a further division between people who live their biblical faith and people who are primarily politically motivated and wear the evangelical identity like a sports jersey.

Brexit

The U.K.’s controversial vote in favor of exiting the European Union was an early harbinger of a global swing toward more-conservative politics and politicians. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump even labeled himself “Mr. Brexit.”

I’ve lived and studied in Britain, so that country is close to my heart. And Sam is Canadian, which is a commonwealth country. [When Brexit happened], we understood its implications about our own American election in an instant, and really wanted to get that across. The next day, the deplorables came out of the woodwork and started attacking Polish people, Muslims, refugees, and black people who had lived in London for three generations. It was horrible. We looked at that, and wanted to make a plea to America that it was not enough that Trump should lose, but he had to lose in a landslide. We had to show ourselves and the world that America is a country that rejects Trump, and rejects attacks on the most vulnerable. That’s what we were warning about in our Brexit piece, and it’s what we’re watching now. Today I woke up and read a news story about a heroic policewoman in New York who saved a baby from a fire, but also happens to wear a hijab, and she was attacked horribly by a racist on the street.