Ellen ends today after a fake victory lap
When Ellen DeGeneres launched her daytime talk show, it felt like a flag planted on lunar terrain.
Six years earlier, the comedian and her sitcom character had come out, in tandem, in what remains the single most well-known moment in the history of queer television. But as one learns in Steven Capsuto’s indispensable book “Alternate Channels” and “Visible: Out on Television,” the extraordinary Apple TV+ docuseries it inspired, that interest soon waned.
As the news cycle moved on, ABC, which aired “Ellen,” grew uncomfortable with its handling of the character’s coming-out process, which it depicted in sympathetic, radical-for-its-time detail. Almost exactly one year after its namesake appeared on the cover of Time, the series was unceremoniously canceled.
Now, as Karl Rove strived to turn marriage equality into the “wedge issue” that would win President George W. Bush reelection, Ellen’s next act seemed equally momentous. With the premiere of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Sept. 8, 2003, she would drop in every afternoon on our mothers and grandmothers — a lesbian in a sweater vest at the suburban coffee klatch table — and offer a daily reminder that queers were fundamentally “normal,” no threat worth waging an election campaign over.
DeGeneres would, in short, become perhaps the most famous LGBTQ person in America, Oscar host and rival to Oprah, icon, omnipresence, eminence — and in so doing carry the banner of queer representation that she held aloft on “Ellen” into a new and more hopeful century.
And for a time she was. She did. But if you have read this far, you will already know the moral of this story: Nothing lasts forever. Which might just be another way of saying that the century doesn’t seem so new, or so hopeful, anymore.
Category errors
The final chapter of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” — which concludes today after nearly 20 years on air — began before this season’s farewell tour. Even before Buzzfeed’s July 2020 report on allegations of a toxic workplace culture on the show that belied its host’s “Be kind” mantra, or a follow-up on sexual misconduct and harassment by executive producers. For DeGeneres’ fall from favor runs deeper than poor management; such stories inflicted lasting damage because they rang true. Here was confirmation, after months of public-relations miscalculations, that DeGeneres was as out of touch as she appeared.
Consider Kevin Hart’s appearance in January 2019, shortly after past homophobic tweets sunk his chance to host that year’s Oscars. The segment performed the rituals of celebrity damage control, with DeGeneres, “as a gay person,” accepting Hart’s apology and demanding his reinstatement as the ceremony’s emcee.
But the conversation might be more striking for what it says about DeGeneres than what it says about Hart: Slipping with breathtaking, almost comic alacrity between performance and personality, the talk-show host’s defense of her guest hinged not on his decency, his regret, even their friendship, but on ... his performance in the movie “The Upside.”
“His movie is so amazing,” she gushed, by way of defending Hart. “‘The Upside’ is so incredible. He is so incredible. I’ve seen it twice.”
To mistake a fellow celebrity’s role in a $100 million tearjerker for moral rectitude is a peculiarly Hollywood brand of category error; it’s as if DeGeneres’ muscle memory for the promotional interview could not adjust to the demands of the moment. Hart, she continued, is “one of the smartest people I know, one of the funniest people I know. And when you see this movie you see the talent and see his acting ability and what the different layers of Kevin Hart is.”
Foolhardy training
What changed, you ask? Not DeGeneres, at least not in the way we might say about an intimate. She remains as unknowable as ever, beyond the handful of particulars — sexual orientation, marital status, burnished anecdote — she chooses to reveal.
No, it’s time that passed, politics that shifted, history itself that unfurled, with DeGeneres, for good and for ill, standing astride the chasm. From her knowing appearance as “a lightning rod of sexual controversy” on “The Larry Sanders Show” in 1996 to that Oscars selfie she took, as host, in 2014, DeGeneres’ trajectory mirrored that of the culture. Alongside the march of same-sex marriage, state by state; the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” (2011); the end of the Defense of Marriage Act (2013); and finally Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which made protections for samesex couples “the law of the land,” she enjoyed her own rise from comic’s comic and sitcom actor to daytime powerhouse, movie star and Hollywood standard-bearer.
It is our foolhardy training, as Americans, to read this process instinctively as progress, and if DeGeneres rode the wave for 20 years, she has since been dashed by it.
Her recent missteps only underscore the notion that even the most apolitical “center” cannot hold, that saying nothing is saying something whether you mean it to or not. Is it “kind to everyone” if you fail to see that your workplace is toxic because your celebrity guests perceive a “happy atmosphere,” then accuse your detractors of a “coordinated” attack?
Dakota Johnson’s appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” in November 2019, in which Johnson famously said, “That’s not the truth, Ellen” about DeGeneres claiming she wasn’t invited to Johnson’s birthday party, captured the public’s attention precisely because it crystallized the suspicion that DeGeneres’ “authenticity” was simply an act. With a mischievous twinkle, Johnson pulled back the curtain to reveal the machinery of the celebrity persona, the army of producers and publicists and assistants just beyond the frame, making clear that stars are not at all like us.
After Ellen
Ellen DeGeneres did not “betray” queer people. Such a claim presumes that she owes us, or speaks for us, and that impossible burden — one she has faced since she came out on “Ellen” — is part of what landed her in this mess in the first place. Still, I cannot help but feel exasperation at her defensive crouch when she’s questioned about Hart, or her responsibility for the toxic work environment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” I cannot help but roll my eyes at the self-pitying strain that runs through “Relatable,” her scrupulously unilluminating 2018 Netflix stand-up special, in which she professes, or performs, frustration at the indignities of the celebrity stratosphere.
As in her interview with Hart, her farewell announcements on “Today” and with Oprah inadvertently expressed a central feature of modern American life, and of DeGeneres’ own postaughts crises: that the very rich and the very famous, the odd Dolly Parton excepted, are in solidarity mostly with themselves.
It does not seem so outrageous to me, in this context, to expect the most prominent LGBTQ American to pull in the same direction, or at least to accept that the price of holding the vanishing center is becoming a little less beloved.
When we lost Ellen, she lost us.