Samantha Bee Gets Some Help From David Duchovny To Find The Truth That’s Out There About FEMA And Puerto Rico

Samantha Bee took Full Frontal to Puerto Rico for an hour-long special on Wednesday and looked at the recovery from Hurricane Maria from all angles. Much like her TBS counterpart Conan and his travels around the globe, this trip to America’s neglected territory mixed the comedy with the realities of life in Puerto Rico after the storm. This includes all the ways the government let the people of the island down — leading to the longest blackout in U.S. history — and how the people of the island are doing their best to make up for those shortcomings. The show also pokes a lot of fun at itself, which is always welcome. Have to bring the levity in at some point.

The show kicked off with the musical number above featuring Javier Muñoz from Hamilton, urging Bee to travel to Puerto Rico and then pushing her off the stage in some sort of murder tourism advertisement.

From there the show moved through the major topics, including the question of making Puerto Rico a state, signing up people to vote, the folks flocking there to avoid paying taxes, and the power situation as you see in the video above. It’s a lot of ground to cover and a lot to digest in just one hour, but Bee and company do a fairly good job of keeping it all under control. Watching it as a full special might overwhelm, but it becomes a different experience in pieces on YouTube.

One of the parts that did stand out involves an appearance by David Duchovny in full conspiracy mode from his X-Files days. He’s given the job of explaining how FEMA failed Puerto Rico and just what was behind their reason for doing so. So armed with conspiracy yarn, Duchovny puts the bits together and tosses in a few ideas about alien-human hybrids to jazz things up a bit. You need that in there because as he points out at the end, it’s less frightening than FEMA just completely dropped the ball due to incompetence.

Check out the whole special on YouTube for the rest of the segments. There is even a t-shirt you can buy after watching Bee put it together to close out the show.

(Via Full Frontal)