(via Variety)

Holding the Trump Administration’s feet to the fire is finally taking precedence over non-topical games. 

Since her debut on TBS, Samantha Bee has almost tripled her ratings with her weekly show “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee”. Though trailing Fallon and The Tonight Show since taking over The Late Show from David Letterman, Stephen Colbert has taken a slight nightly ratings lead over Jimmy in these recent weeks after Trump’s inauguration and the whirlwind insanity of executive orders, overturned bans, resignations, etc. have dominated the news. Stephen has not wavered in taking Trump to task and didn’t jostle his hair when Trump went on The Late Show. 

That being said, The Tonight Show has got a bit edgier recently with having Jo Firestone play Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. 

Additionally, there seem to be an uptick in Colbert dropping F-bombs in the opening monologue as an appropriate expression of his feelings about what’s going on in The White House. There might not be a correlation with the new ratings lead, but it’s a shift in tactics from when Stephen used to just make fun of sidestepping explicit language because of being on CBS at 11:35PM. 

Going forward, Bee will undoubtedly get more latitude to do even more of what she wants and Colbert might just increase his lead with being a more defiant Colbert. We’re sure that’s the Colbert that will be hosting when The Late Show goes live after the February 28th Trump address to Congress.