How Samantha Bee is hosting ‘Full Frontal’ from her backyard

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“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” returned to TBS Wednesday night with a new studio — Bee’s woodsy suburban backyard. Like her other late-night cohorts, Bee — who’s married to actor/comedian Jason Jones (“The Detour”) — is self-quarantining at home during the coronavirus outbreak. But unlike the Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel), Seth Meyers, Conan O’Brien et …

“Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” returned to TBS Wednesday night with a new studio — Bee’s woodsy suburban backyard.

Like her other late-night cohorts, Bee — who’s married to actor/comedian Jason Jones (“The Detour”) — is self-quarantining at home during the coronavirus outbreak. But unlike the Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel), Seth Meyers, Conan O’Brien et al., Bee is doing most of her show outside in her backyard — with Jones as her lone “cameraman” until “Full Frontal” can return to the CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th St.

While Bee (and Jones) made her “Full Frontal” return look effortless, the logistics of arranging the shoot were extremely complicated, says “Full Frontal” executive producer Alison Camillo.

“It was super-challenging,” she says. “The hardest part is communication because everyone is [working from] home. Normally, we’re on top of each other and jumping into each other’s offices … but when you do something this way, it’s very time-consuming, even to set up a [telephone] meeting and to get these little conversations to happen.

“We were on the phone pretty much for the entire week to make [Wednesday night’s show] happen,” she says. “Jason, Sam’s husband, shot the entire show out in their yard. They were the only people there. We’re so grateful they know what they’re doing because we can’t even help them with the technology. There’s no way to get it to them and they have to make the best with what they have.”

Camillo says the “Full Frontal” staff, including Bee, didn’t want to “dial it back any more than we had to” just because Bee was taping in her backyard. “We made sure we had full graphics. We really wanted to challenge ourselves,” she says. “We even had animation in some segments … so it would feel 100 percent like the [usual] show.”

Jones and Bee shot the “Full Frontal” episode with a combination of equipment, some they own and some carted in from the “Full Frontal” studios.

“They’re both TV people so they have a lot of stuff at home,” Camillo says. “The day we found out we were shutting down the office, we grabbed all the equipment we could and took it home with us — lights, and stuff like that — then drove it up to Sam’s house the next day, wearing masks and gloves, and left it on their lawn.”

The show itself followed the usual “Full Frontal” blueprint in terms of writing and editing, Camillo says. “We probably had 100 phone calls with the writers to plan everything — these are the things we’ll be talking about, this is who will do it — then the writers get assigned different parts of [what Bee will talk about] and give that to our head writers, Mike Drucker and Kristen Bartlett, who assemble a first pass. Then it goes to Sam. Everyone weighs in, like ‘This part needs to be a little clearer or tighter.’ ”

Camillo says the entire “Full Frontal” team learned a lot from Wednesday night’s show and will use the experience to forge ahead as Bee continues to host the show from suburbia.

“I’m going to have a phone call with everyone on the production side today to see what worked and what didn’t work,” she says. “We’ll be bulking up with extra manpower, including extra graphics people. We’ll be tweaking the equipment and how we edit everything. We didn’t hit anything like a giant wall; I think a lot of that was luck but it was certainly welcome.”

And, she says, modern technology certainly made producing “Full Frontal” from Bee’s backyard much easier than it would have been a decade ago. “All of these things we use — Zoom and Slack and Google Hangouts — are vital to the process,” she says. “Even down to the granular elements, like Sam downloading the Teleprompter on her iPad. That didn’t exist 10 years ago.”