For all the flaws of Ellen as a series, I will not deny the power of ‘The Puppy Episode’. DeGeneres put everything she had in that episode, both as a writer and an actress. Everything about it was funny and powerful. She was smart enough to give a lot of the funny lines to Laura Dern (who won her first Emmy for that role), showed the struggle that her character was going through, had her admit the basic truth to herself in public, come out to her close friends, and finally face the truth with her therapist (Oprah Winfrey, who was also nominated for an Emmy) DeGeneres’ deservedly won an Emmy for writing the episode and the only reason she didn’t take Best Actress that same year was because the mostly conservative Emmy voters were not yet ready to give an Emmy to an openly gay actor for playing an openly gay character. (Two years, they’d cross that threshold when Sean Hayes won for Will and Grace.)
The rest as they say is history. The pressure from religious organizations became more intense in the show’s fifth season, the controversy that followed the series caused the boost in the ratings to deteriorate over the year, and the show ended almost as an afterthought in May of 1998. That’s the story. But it’s not the whole story.
As I said in the first part of the article, I watched Ellen before and after ‘The Puppy Episode’. And because I was fixed in my habits and didn’t care what people thought, I kept watching it through the final season. I admit the series remained daring – watching Ellen handle her homosexuality, her parents handling it, her finally having a relationship with another woman, and her first lesbian sexual encounter. What Ellen didn’t become was noticeably funnier after ‘The Puppy Episode’. All of the supporting characters remained more or less one dimensional with very conventional plots, and the jokes were not much improved for any of the characters. Ellen may have been a groundbreaking series, but not all groundbreaking series are necessarily great ones.
That said there was a hysterically funny episode that aired halfway through the final season that truly showed what DeGeneres was capable of. In it, Ellen and her friends are having lunch in an LA restaurant when they have an encounter with Emma Thompson. All are star struck, Ellen goes to the bathroom, and sees Thompson in a lip lock with another woman. Ellen is shocked that Thompson is gay, but her friends aren’t: one character says: “Half this town is gay and the rest are pretending to get in with David Geffen.” That got a huge laugh.
Ellen has a conversation with Thompson and spends half the episode persuading her to come out of the closet. Then she learns Thompson’s biggest secret – and it’s not that she’s a lesbian. “I was born in Dayton, Ohio.” The laugh went for fifteen seconds. As Ellen blunders to respond and talks about her career, in a perfect American accent, Thompson says: “I learned the accent from watching Julie Andrews’ movies!” Laughter and applause for thirty seconds. Ellen persuades Thompson to stay in the closet, not because she doesn’t think the country can handle that Thompson is gay, but rather that she’s American.
That night, at a movie premiere there’s a filmed segment where Sean Penn (who’s co-starring with her in her latest film) gives a powerful speech about a brilliant actress she is and how honest a person she is. Thompson is touched, and tells Ellen she’s going to say: “I’m gay and a Yank.” But before she can get up, Penn keeps speaking – and saying that her honesty has inspired him to come out of the closet. (Was he auditioning to play Harvey Milk back then?). Thompson is angry, but moves forward. The end credits sequence is funny but sad – Thompson is at a restaurant telling Ellen she’s glad she did, then she gets to her feet, and in her ‘real’ accent asks Ellen for her order. Thompson was nominated for an Emmy for this performance (I don’t recall if she won) and if the series had maintained this level of brilliance and daring, it might have kept running despite the controversy. It did not.
The series finale of Ellen attracted little attention, not so much because people had forgotten the series but because it aired the same month as two true classics of the genre closed up shop: Seinfeld and Murphy Brown. Even if it had aired at a more opportune time, I seriously doubt it would have gotten more attention. I saw it, and it deserves to be forgotten.
Rather than try to wrap up the storylines of her series, Ellen pretended to be a comic whose work spanned the generations. There were films of her in vaudeville, shows of her hosting a game show, and then segments of Ellen as if it had aired in every decade from the sixties to the nineties. It satirized every genre: from Norman Lear to animated series, and had a plethora of guest stars all saying how much the series meant to them at one time. It was truly wretched.
But the worst part – and I have no doubt this was especially true to the gay and lesbian community at the time – came in the last five minutes. Linda Ellerbee, who somehow got roped in to doing the ‘retrospective’ on Ellen was about to talk about the most famous moment. The showed the segment from ‘The Puppy Episode’ when Ellen is at the airport with Laura Dern. She gets to the point when she says she’s thirty-five years old, and…
The screen freezes. Ellerbee asks: “Don’t you want to show the important part?” DeGeneres’ says that was the important part: “I was the first person on TV to admit their actual age.” Ellerbee considers this for a minute: “Are you sure that was what important?” DeGeneres thinks for a moment, and shakes her head emphatically: “Nope that was it.”
Even as a cis male, I found that offensive then and now, and can’t comprehend why she did this. Was she rejecting her groundbreaking moment as something that she now simply considering a storyline that didn’t work? I know that DeGeneres has never made her sexuality part of her act the way so many future gay and lesbian comics have (something that has not changed after she returned to standup) but it’s hard not to look at this as a middle finger to everybody who had come to celebrate her that past year. I can understand why that generation and quite a bit of the LGBTQ+ community has never celebrated DeGeneres and Ellen the same way that did so many other series that came later – I may not have liked Queer as Folk or The L Word but the one thing neither series did was shy away from what its leads were. And both series were more than willing to break doors down – at its best, Ellen only knocked politely and was more than willing to walk away if no one wanted to let them in.
That’s the reason, at its core, why Ellen did not work. It was never a funny series, or even a particularly good one. Did DeGeneres’ pay a cost for coming out of the closet? I have no doubt. But part of me thinks the series would have inevitably been cancelled anyway. DeGeneres’ never fit easily into her role of trailblazer when it came to LGBTQ+ rights, and I have a feeling that the last five minutes of Ellen was flipping the bird more to the people who she thought only watched her show for the wrong reasons. That would be bad enough when you considered without them, there would have been no reason to watch Ellen.
A final note about the controversies that befell Ellen DeGeneres during the final years of her long running talk show. She has been blamed for being an unpleasant personality and creating a toxic work environment behind the scenes. Without stating whether I believe that’s true or not, let’s have a larger discussion.
We never want to believe the worst about our heroes. Everyone thought the ban on Pete Rose from baseball was a crime even when they heard the evidence. Millions worshipped Johnny Carson as the king of Late Night, when the stories have come out that he was a fairly unpleasant man to those who crossed him and to his rivals. And this spring millions chose to believe Johnny Depp over Amber Heard even though the former’s reputation had been in a landfill for awhile.
All of these people are straight white men, of course. But hero worship, even now, crosses all race, gender and sexuality barriers. If anything, the people who idolize minority celebrities who undergo a fall from grace are more likely to defend their heroes no matter what the evidence. This year We Need to Talk about Cosby showed just how much the world was willing to defend Bill Cosby even before we learned some of the things that he did over time. (I recommend that docu-series, by the way.)
They do so, almost always making comparison to white males over and over, and they’re not entirely wrong about them. In any field in the world, anyone who isn’t a white male is given infinitely fewer chances to succeed than one. Watching The Dropout, I got the feeling that’s why so many smart people were willing to believe and defend Elizabeth Holmes even though they should have known better. Now, of course, women in Silicon Valley are paying the prize as a result.
I don’t pretend to be any different. For years I denied the rumors that I had been hearing about Joss Whedon because I spent my twenties in love with almost every TV series he produced. Some of my first written articles in criticism blame the Emmys for refusing to nominate Whedon and Buffy for some of the most brilliant in television in decades. Then two years ago, when I heard Charisma Carpenter finally reveal the truth behind Whedon’s reaction to her pregnancy during Season 4 of Angel, how he bullied her, and how he treated her character as a result on that series, I couldn’t keep lying to myself. The man whose writing I had considered genius, who millions had considered a feminist icon, was another example of toxic masculinity.
But here is the thing. I admit I may be out of my depth when I speak in these terms, and that I may draw fire for saying so but it has to be said. If we are truly to believe in equality for everybody – and I mean this in all fields, not only entertainment – we fundamentally have to accept that all our heroes – no matter our race, gender or sexuality – can be as monstrous as the white males who dominate every field.
This is not an easy lesson to learn nor is it one that we want to accept. But it’s not one we can deny either. Roseanne was a monster to almost everybody who worked on her hit series on ABC for more than a decade. Brett Butler, who for a while had a hit show on ABC around the same time as Ellen (Grace Under Fire) was eventually revealed by her writers as one of the worst bosses they’d ever had who created a toxic work environment. More recently SMILF an engaging comic series on Showtime was cancelled after the network executives learned that showrunner Frankie Shaw had been body-shaming many of the female co-stars on the series.
Even in age of social media, when so many of our idols keep getting torn down because of what would have been minor setbacks in decades past, there is still a tendency among their fans to overlook the flaws in their heroes or heroines character, no matter the evidence, because we can not get past what they do to serve as role models. I imagine that’s infinitely harder for people who don’t look like me. But especially when it comes to artists, we have to accept that they are as human as the rest of us. Then we must make the decision – and it’s never easy – as to whether we can separate their art from their character.
I don’t know if Ellen DeGeneres is truly as horrible a person to work for as, say, David Chase of The Sopranos was. Maybe she’ll never get another job for the rest of her life. It’s just as likely that all LGTBQ+ actors and actresses will reject her even more; maybe Kate McKinnon, who gushed about her when she gave her a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes only last year, will think twice before she says she still idolizes her. And I have no doubt the rich, white men who run the networks will think twice before giving any comedian or comedienne with a similar orientation a talk show on any network. I get it, and it’s not fair for anyone. But if we don’t accept this as a learning experience, then nobody learns.
Because Ellen DeGeneres’ did change TV. It didn’t benefit her career, but that’s the thing about all groundbreakers: they lay the seeds for the success of those who come next – the Tig Notaros’, the Jerrod Carmichaels’, and so many others. She was never a sinner (not the sense that so many thought) but she was never a saint either. No one is, not even the revolutionaries.
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