Critic’s Notebook: The Sweet and Sour Legacy of ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’
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“Have you ever seen Ellen’s talk show?” my elderly uncle asked me offhandedly a few years ago. “I really don’t like it. She seems mean. You know, mean-spirited.”
In all honesty, unless it involves a British police procedural, my uncle couldn’t give a rat’s tushy about the goings-on of popular culture. Our conversation occurred many years before allegations of on-set racism and nastiness took down the proverbial “Queen of Nice” in the summer of 2020, eventually leading to plummeting ratings and the end of the series. He hadn’t heard, like I had, whispers from friends of friends of friends who had worked on her show and reported shockingly tyrannical behavior from a person who had built their career on pleasant, quotidian relatability. He had simply caught a few of his wife’s DVR’d episodes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show and recognized something gleefully cruel in the way the host liked to frequently “gotcha” people. (She may be known for her goofily innocuous solo dancing, but one of her favorite running gags involves randomly jump-scaring celebrities into heart palpitations.)
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In the words of Stephen Sondheim, “Nice is different than good.” DeGeneres has always straddled the line between light and dark, between antic fun and snappish charisma. After all, what comedian doesn’t have a fundamental mean streak? And what comedian doesn’t eventually become entrapped by their own persona? Rosie O’Donnell, a former daytime talk show giant in her own right, spent the 1990s as, among other things, a kid-friendly celebrity until she was felled by her own venom, losing the public’s trust once she showed us what was really behind her nurturing facade. John Mulaney, a ventriloquist’s dummy of a stand-up known for his jokes about his domestic life and humble upbringing, lost his Nice Guy reputation last year when he went to rehab, divorced his wife and impregnated Olivia Munn.
No one, not even someone who is paid to make us laugh, can be wholesome or lovable all the time. DeGeneres’ name will forever be marred by rumors and exposés about the toxic work environments she has helmed over the years. Her Faustian bargain — to hide her more complex nature in plain sight while she played everyone’s favorite sweater vest-clad relative — eventually cost her in the end. Critics claim she cozied up to controversial figures to maintain her “everyone gets a fair shot” centrist image. Nah. This was just a rich and powerful celeb who sided with other rich and powerful celebs because how could we, the plebs, possibly understand their lives? I wonder if she felt any relief when her empire started to crumble. Who can maintain a public guise for that long without feeling the itch to take off the mask once and for all?
This week, DeGeneres ends her popular syndicated daytime talk show 19 years after its frankly risky launch in 2003. The high-energy, feel-good show always had a little bit for everyone, appealing to that coveted “four-quadrant” demographic that includes men, women, youngs and olds, even if daytime viewership is still dominated by women. Known for its prank sequences, celebrity interviews, audience participation games, dance and musical interludes, and kid-led recurring segments, the show has won more than 60 Daytime Emmys, with Ellen herself receiving more than 30 of those. In the past two decades, DeGeneres, 64, has authored books, become a lifestyle brand influencer, started her own record and production companies, served as a perennial awards ceremony host, and, perhaps most memorably, been a cartoon voice actor (headlining her own Disney flick, 2016’s piscine adventure Finding Dory, a sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo).
While politicized coffee klatch shows like The View continue to cycle through hosts and heart-healing former daytime deity Oprah Winfrey has long since moved on to larger TV mogul ventures, Ellen remained a stalwart hour for impish escapism. She wasn’t there to fire you up about daily news briefs or help you process your trauma. She has had no interest in overtly challenging her audience or her guests, instead offering them both an opportunity for a bit of light frippery. With her brightly lit and homey set, awash in cool, comforting blues and greens, she made silly fun with big names, humanizing the Beautiful People with game show-style interludes that made even larger-than-life celebs seem a little more like the rest of us.
Unlike more jaded daytime hosts, she worked to bolster our trust in the Hollywood machine, not chip away at it. She even sometimes invited viewers into her marriage, her wife Portia de Rossi becoming somewhat of a recurring character through guest appearances and DeGeneres’ own monologues and side comments. Her warmth and cleverness, alongside her well-honed self-effacing neuroticism, evoking some of the most beloved, family-friendly comedians of the 1940s and 1950s, made for comfort viewing at its finest.
When the news feels relentlessly and hopelessly tragic, comedians like DeGeneres help viewers forget their despair, even for a short while. While her exit leaves a power vacuum in the daytime industry, it may also allow some similarly bright and bubbly up-and-comers like Kelly Clarkson and Drew Barrymore to shine. Yet, as talented and likable as those women are, a comedian brings different sorts of skills to the table, such as the ability to spin on a moment’s notice and the good judgment to know when to crack a joke and when to hold their tongue.
DeGeneres’ convivial persona and infectious grin are so ubiquitous, it’s easy to forget that a little more than 20 years ago, a gay woman in masc-forward fashion landing a talk show gig was absolutely groundbreaking and more than a little perilous. Daytime TV is supposed to be the bread and butter of the minivan majority — how would someone outside of the hetero-feminine celebrity pantheon fare among people who considered Oprah their goddess supreme?
Just a few years before her show launched, DeGeneres was a Hollywood pariah. Coming out in 1997, first on the cover of Time magazine with the words “Yep, I’m Gay” and then again in the infamous “The Puppy Episode” of her all-but-forgotten eponymous ABC sitcom, just about cratered her career. I venture to guess that the core of her show’s audience has only a passing familiarity with the first half of her stardom, which began in the comedy clubs of New Orleans in the late 1970s. She had a dry and semi-cerebral style in her early days, with people like Bob Newhart, Steve Martin and Woody Allen among her comedy folk heroes and influences. She was an unassuming Everywoman, a sly wit with sympathizable foibles.
By the 1990s, she had her own primetime network comedy, Ellen, a minor Seinfeld derivative, and was a burgeoning film lead with 1996 black comedy Mr. Wrong (a flop I actually saw in theaters at age 7, Lord help me). Her show was canceled not long after she came out. At the time, prejudiced naysayers asserted she was “flaunting” her relationship with actress Anne Heche (seen in the tabloids as a confused bisexual woman) and made “degenerate” jokes playing on her last name. It’s practically a miracle that DeGeneres was able to return to the public consciousness given the spiking homophobia of the late ’90s and early 2000s.
But that miracle was no accident. DeGeneres made the calculated choice to pivot from a wry observational comedian, whom entertainment executives had tried and failed to remake as heteronormatized “It” girl, to an avuncular charmer full of playful, clownish and neutered vigor. She embellished and embraced the happy-go-lucky parts of her personality and became everyone and no one all at once.
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