The rise and fall of Ellen DeGeneres and what’s next for the TV talk show host and comedian
Ellen DeGeneres was America’s most beloved talk show host, but was derailed by a workplace scandal. We look at what her future holds.
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When Ellen DeGeneres announced during the week that she was quitting her once wildly popular talk show, it felt like something of a seismic cultural shift.
For close to 20 years, DeGeneres has reigned supreme over daytime TV as the literal face of Ellen (especially after her idol and friend Oprah Winfrey ended her show in 2011), regularly pulling in millions of viewers around the globe daily. She was beloved the world over – who could forget the hysteria surrounding her Australian shows in 2013? – for her goofy dancing, her relentless cheesy pranks, her generous giveaways and her routinely softball interviews with her celebrity mates, who time and again returned to her pristine white couches to chat about not much.
DeGeneres pushed her likability ad nauseam, hinging her persona around a “be kind” mantra, a vanilla niceness that attracted every Hollywood A-lister and endeared her to all Americans across every political divide (“I’m not political”, she reminded her audience time and again), no mean feat for an openly gay performer.
But during the past 12 months, the shine around DeGeneres has dulled significantly. For years, there’d been rumblings that her on screen persona was miles apart from what she was really like off screen. No great surprise – we all put on a face to the world.
But the trouble really started last July when Buzzfeed published a damning expose about rampant unhappiness behind the scenes at DeGeneres’ show, accusing the star of fostering a toxic workplace environment, amid accusations of bullying, racial insensitivity and alleged sexual harassment from some of her most trusted senior producers towards underlings.
Even other celebrities started speaking out against her. Comedian Kathy Griffin had been calling out her behaviour for years while former Everybody Loves Raymond star, Brad Garrett, had a crack at DeGeneres on Twitter.
“Sorry but it comes from the top @TheEllenShow,” he wrote, tagging DeGeneres. “Know more than one who were treated horribly by her. Common knowledge.”
An Emmy Award-winning actor, who asked not to be named, told News Corp Australia that when he had been a guest on her show, she had not spoken to him before the taping and a crew member had to stand behind him (off camera) with the actor’s name written on a piece of paper so DeGeneres wouldn’t forget who she was talking to.
A tearful DeGeneres promised to do better and Warner Bros, who produced the show, instigated a full investigation. That ultimately ended in the sackings of three of her top producers, Kevin Leman, Ed Glavin and Jonathan Norman.
But there was something else. Plainly, DeGeneres had become more and more removed from the audience she claimed to so closely identify with.
In a 2018 New York Times profile, she came across as more guarded and said she felt “boxed in” by her “be kind” persona. And DeGeneres’ Australian wife, Portia de Rossi, told the outlet that the star is “just a bit more complicated than she appears on the show”.
There was also her misguided defence of comedian Kevin Hart after he stepped down from his 2019 Oscars hosting gig over past homophobic tweets that he stubbornly refused to apologise for.
Then there were the photos of DeGeneres and de Rossi with George and Laura Bush seated in a luxury box at a 2019 Dallas Cowboys football game, which caused uproar, given the former US President’s abysmal record on LGBTQ rights.
DeGeneres defended the friendship, saying “I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different. And I think that we’ve forgotten that that’s OK that we’re all different.”
Meanwhile, off screen, she spent her time flipping multimillion-dollar California mansions, moving from one estate to another at the drop of a hat, which many of her viewers who were struggling amid the pandemic found difficult to swallow.
Her clueless comment that being in lockdown in her $30 million mansion was “like being in prison” didn’t help.
And in 2020, her brand of resolute fence-sitting didn’t land in an America, which had faced its own racial and social reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The systemic racism that has existed within Hollywood for years would no longer be tolerated and people were speaking up.
Faced with the allegations, DeGeneres took the position of a wounded puppy.
Speaking to the Today show’s Savannah Guthrie in the US on Thursday, DeGeneres said the situation broke her heart.
“It was devastating, I am a kind person, I am a person who likes to make people happy,” a mournful DeGeneres said.
“I really didn’t understand it, I still don’t understand it … it was too orchestrated, it was too co-ordinated.”
The pile on felt “misogynistic”, she said.
“You know, people get picked on, but four months straight for me? And for me to read in the press about a toxic work environment when all I’ve ever heard from every guest on the show is what a happy place it is, what a happy environment it is.”
She also told Guthrie “how could I have known?” about the bullying, racial insensitivity and sexual harassment allegations, saying she had “no idea” about what went on behind the scenes at her show (an indictment on her as a leader, regardless). She told Guthrie someone “should have” told her.
Still, she soldiered on, returning to her show last September, telling viewers, “I learned that things happen here that never should have happened. I take that very seriously. And I want to say I am so sorry to the people who were affected.”
The season premiere was the show’s highest-rating launch in years but audiences soon deserted her, which would have once been unheard of.
Indeed, since September, the show has lost more than a million viewers in the US, a staggering drop for someone of her star power.
When she finally pulled the pin this week she said it was not because of the scandal of the past year but because “it’s just not a challenge any more”.
But just 24 hours later, DeGeneres seemed to slightly shift her stance agreeing with Guthrie that she really had been “cancelled”.
In the end, it was not surprising that DeGeneres invited her old pal, Oprah Winfrey, onto her show to explain her reasons in stepping away.
It was Oprah, after all, who played DeGeneres’ therapist on the star’s landmark “coming out” episode on the comedian’s eponymous sitcom in 1997, a move that derailed DeGeneres’ career for years and sent her into a deep depression. She thought she’d never work again only to be given a lifeline by Warner Bros when they signed her to much industry consternation to front a talk show in 2003. (For her part, Winfrey said she received the most hate mail she’d ever received after appearing on the “coming out” episode.)
“It’s real now,” an emotional DeGeneres told Winfrey.
“As a creative person I really need to be challenged, there’s different things as a creative person that I need to do. It’s the end of this and it’s the beginning of another chapter.”
Winfrey said she was “proud” of DeGeneres for stepping away.
“Only you know when it’s time,” she said.
Still, DeGeneres’ contribution to the culture cannot be underestimated. For the LGBTQ community, she has been a trailblazer; let’s not forget that having an out lesbian on our screens every day did wonders for LGBTQ representation globally and placing an openly gay person into Middle America’s living rooms – and Australia’s, for that matter – bordered on revolutionary when her show premiered in 2003.
But what’s next? She dipped her toe back into stand-up after a 15-year absence with the middling Netflix special Relatable (again, constant jokes about how she really wasn’t er, relatable at all). More recently, the design-obsessive DeGeneres produced the HBO competition reality series Ellen’s Next Great Designer.
She did however, point to the example of Winfrey who, after canning her beloved talk show, went on to build her OWN network as well as signing a mega deal to produce content for Apple TV+. (Not to mention conducting and producing occasional bombshell interviews with former members of the royal family.)
“Look at [Winfrey]. She stopped and she didn’t have to do anything again, and she’s done a tremendous amount since then,” DeGeneres told The Hollywood Reporter. “So, I don’t look at this as the end at all. It’s the start of a new chapter, and hopefully, my fans will go with me wherever I go.”
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Originally published as The rise and fall of Ellen DeGeneres and what’s next for the TV talk show host and comedian
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