Television Timeline: The scandal that brought down Ellen DeGeneres’ talk showĮllen DeGeneres announced Wednesday that her popular daytime talk show will end next year.
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. Here was confirmation, after months of public-relations miscalculations, that DeGeneres was as out of touch as she appeared.Ĭonsider Kevin Hart’s appearance in January 2019, shortly after past homophobic tweets sunk his chance to host that year’s Oscars. For DeGeneres’ fall from favor runs deeper than poor management such stories inflicted lasting damage because they rang true. 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. The final chapter of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” set to conclude Thursday after nearly 20 years on air, began before this season’s farewell tour. Which might just be another way of saying that the century doesn’t seem so new, or so hopeful, anymore. But if you have read this far, you will already know the moral of this story: Nothing lasts forever. What the talk show host said in Thursday’s exit interviews only prolonged the controversy around her, raising the question: What will she do next?ĭeGeneres 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.Īnd for a time she was. 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.Įntertainment & Arts Column: Ellen DeGeneres announced the end of her show. With the premiere of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” on Sept.
Bush re-election, Ellen’s next act seemed equally momentous. Now, as Karl Rove strived to turn marriage equality into the “wedge issue” that would win President George W.
Almost exactly one year after its namesake appeared on the cover of Time, the series was unceremoniously canceled. But as one learns in Steven Capsuto’s indispensable book “Alternate Channels” and the extraordinary Apple TV+ docuseries “Visible: Out on Television,” that interest soon waned.Īs 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. 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. When Ellen DeGeneres launched her daytime talk show, it felt like a flag planted on lunar terrain. (Devin Oktar Yalkin / For The Times source photo: Associated Press)