“I used to say that I didn’t care what other people thought of me, and I realise now looking back, I said that at the height of my popularity,” American comedian Ellen DeGeneres says in the opening sequence of her new Netflix comedy special. If the audience’s cheering in reply is any measure, they’re in on the gag.
But the 66-year-old comedian’s part setting the record straight, part mea culpa is also an uncomfortable exercise in reputation repair, a “final tour” that tries to lay down a final account of the highs and, since 2020, the lows of a career that took DeGeneres from sitcom star to talk show queen.
Sold out … the final chapter of Ellen DeGeneres’ show business career?Credit: Wilson Webb/Netflix
When Hollywood takes something to market to court votes for Oscars or Emmy awards, it crowns it in the gentlest of requests: “For Your Consideration,” the invitation says. This 70-minute Netflix comedy special goes one step further in its pursuit of a positive outcome, with the less-subtle subtitle For Your Approval.
To DeGeneres’ credit, the special does not shy away from the scandal that engulfed her in the final two years of her show’s 19-year run. The opening sequence pulls quotes from TV reports over the years: Ellen “praised for delivering a daily dose of joy”, gushes one presenter, before another offers, in an ominous tone, “is the queen of nice really the queen of mean?”
“A few years ago, I started ending my show by saying, ‘Be kind to one another,’” DeGeneres says, when she finally takes the stage. “Here’s the downside. I can never do anything unkind now, ever.” Well, that’s true. Though you’d think in such a perfect (privileged) world, none of us would surely complain about the lack of freedom to be mean.
Indeed in Hollywood, the path to reputation repair has been paved for decades with the biggest names: Robert Downey Jr, who spent most of the ’90s evading drug charges or jail, only to now lead the $US29 billion ($42.6 billion) Marvel franchise, and Winona Ryder, who went from shoplifting to Stranger Things and this year’s box office favourite, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Ellen DeGeneres with Portia de Rossi backstage during the filming of For Your Approval.Credit: Adam Rose/Netflix
Martha Stewart went to prison, and then the Paris Olympics. David Letterman ended his talk show career with headlines around infidelity and blackmail. Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch. And if you have an hour, just Google Alec Baldwin. So what, exactly, is the problem with Ellen DeGeneres?
If you don’t know who DeGeneres is, or just vaguely remember her downfall, here’s the recap: in 2020, at the height of the “daily dose of joy” on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, 10 former employees accused the host of presiding over a “toxic” on-set atmosphere of “racism, fear and intimidation”.
Unlike most burn-and-churn headlines of Hollywood’s icon-bashing media machine, this was more like the stopper had been prised off the bad genie’s bottle: suddenly everyone had a story about Ellen being mean, and after an internal investigation DeGeneres took responsibility and pledged to “correct the issues”.
Then in May 2022 – less than two years after the allegations were first aired – The Ellen Degeneres Show was dead in the water. After 3339 episodes of scripted mayhem, game-playing and hilarious stunts, the studio lights went dark.
Ellen DeGeneres with Michelle Obama during a taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.Credit: Telepictures
“[It’s] such a waste of time to worry about what people think of us,” DeGeneres, who is married to Australian actor Portia de Rossi, says in her special. Which is true, except that it’s so painfully obvious that she does.
The challenge of trying to frame DeGeneres’ career with the headlines that defined the last chapter of it is that it plays too easily into an old Hollywood playbook, one which carves out heroes and villains and too easily saddles one person with the blame.
Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval.Credit: Adam Rose/Netflix
Even now, as the world’s media dismantles Ellen’s comedy special, we are watching the repair of the reputations of Will Smith, banished in 2022 for the slap heard around the world, and Kevin Spacey, accused several times since 2017 of sexual misconduct. A London jury acquitted Spacey of sexual assault charges in July 2023. In 2022, a New York court dismissed a lawsuit against him.
Smith’s latest film Bad Boys: Ride or Die was a modest hit: $US404 million at the box office, off a $US100 million budget.
And Spacey, despite the reputation damage, has filmed roles in Control and Once Upon a Time in Croatia, and has people like Sharon Stone, Liam Neeson, Stephen Fry and director Trevor Nunn calling for his forgiveness.
So where does that leave Ellen DeGeneres? The Independent called her special “bizarre, unfunny and self-pitying”. Slate found it “galling”.
And for DeGeneres herself? “I got kicked out of show business for being mean,” she told a stand-up audience in Burbank in California during her farewell tour, in a startlingly thin summary of everything that transpired. “This is the last time you’re going to see me. After my Netflix special, I’m done.”
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