Ellen DeGeneres says goodbye to her eponymous talk show after 19 years
Jennifer Aniston, Billie Eilish, and Pink joined DeGeneres for her final episode
Aux News Ellen DeGeneres
It’s been a long–and in later years, rocky–road for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, but the host finally said goodbye to her eponymous daytime talk show on Thursday. The emotional episode featured many callbacks to the first episode nearly two decades ago, including the return of first-ever guest Jennifer Aniston.
But first, the monologue: “I walked out here 19 years ago, and I said this is the start of a relationship. And today is not the end of a relationship, it’s more of a little break. You can see other talk shows now. I may see another audience once in a while,” DeGeneres joked at the top of the episode.
Reflecting on the historic nature of the program, she continued, “Twenty years ago when we were trying to sell the show, no one thought that this would work. Not because it was a different kind of show, but because I was different. Very few stations wanted to buy the show, and here we are, 20 years later, celebrating this amazing journey together.”
“When we started this show I couldn’t say, ‘gay’ on the show … I said it at home, a lot. ‘What are we having for our gay breakfast?’ Or, ‘Pass the gay salt.’ ‘Has anyone seen the gay remote?’ Things like that. But we couldn’t say, ‘gay,’” DeGeneres said. “I couldn’t say, ‘we’ because that implied that I was with someone. Sure couldn’t say, ‘wife,’ and that’s because it wasn’t legal for gay people to get married, and now I say ‘wife’ all the time.”
She went on, “Twenty-five years ago, they canceled my sitcom because they didn’t want a lesbian to be in prime time once a week. And I said, ‘OK, then I’ll be on daytime every day. How about that?’ What a beautiful, beautiful journey that we have been on together. And if this show has made you smile, if it has lifted you up, when you’re in a period of some type of pain, some type of sadness, anything that you’re going through, then I have done my job.”
Sharing a moment with sidekick tWitch, DeGeneres said she was proud of the “family atmosphere” they had created over the years (contrary to the reports that the comedian had fostered a toxic workplace environment, which came out shortly before she announced the show would be coming to an end).
During Aniston’s segment, the actor gifted DeGeneres a “Thanks for the memories” floor mat, throwing it back to the “Welcome” mat she had given the host for her first episode. Asked for advice about wrapping up a long-running series, the Friends alum recalled, “Well, I got a divorce and went into therapy, and then I did a movie called The Break-Up. I just kind of leaned into the end.”
The second guest was a newer friend, Billie Eilish, who told DeGeneres, “You started this show the year after I was born. This was in my house constantly. Every day. I would walk into the kitchen, and my mom would be watching you.”
Pink, who wrote a new theme song for the show back in the 13th season, was the episode’s final guest. “This is a very strange feeling for me because I’ve known you for so long, and you’ve meant so much in my life, personally, but in everybody’s life,” she said to DeGeneres before performing “What About Us.”
“I wanted to be a singer because I wanted to grow up and change the world and make it a better place. You’ve done that in so many ways,” Pink went on. “Maybe I help people find their pain. You help people find their joy, and we need that so badly in the world. You are as kind as you seem, and you support people, and when you shine your light on them, it’s like staring into the sun.”
As she concluded the show, DeGeneres tearfully addressed the audience, saying, “To all of you who have watched this show and supported me, thank you so much for this platform. I hope that what I’ve been able to do in the last 19 years has made you happy, and that I was able to take a little bit of pain away from a bad day or anything you’re going through. And I hope I’ve been able to inspire you to make other people happy and to do good in the world, to feel like you have a purpose.”
“And I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. If I’ve done anything in the past 19 years, I hope I’ve inspired you to be yourself; your true, authentic self. And if someone is brave enough to tell you who they are, be brave enough to support them, even if you don’t understand,” she said. “They’re showing you who they are, and that is the biggest gift anybody can ever give you. By opening your heart and your mind, you’re going to be that much more compassionate, and compassion is what makes the world a better place. Thank you so much for being on this journey with me. I feel the love, and I send it back to you. Bye.”
In the series’ final moments, DeGeneres recreated another moment from her first episode, walking over to a couch and watching herself on a television screen. She took one final look at the audience before turning the TV off. The stage then closed on one final “thank you” from the host, ending an era of daytime television.
69 Comments
Good luck with your career in dentistry!
She fixed the Bumble’s teeth. Can fix yours too!
“Ellen wants to be a dentist!”
I think Ellen ultimately suffered from trying to create a product built on being nice and kind. People, particularly the media, delight in a facade of goodness crumbling. They did with Rosie O’Donnell’s show in the 90’s, with Ellen now, and I assume they will do it with Kelly Clarkson in 10 years or so. Mr. Rogers is the only person that I can think of who was as gentle and kind as the persona that he portrayed.Personally, I’m happy that moms have a nice place to go to, during the day, and I thought Ellen made a charming piece of fluff. She probably held on too long but if somebody was backing up a dumptruck full of money to my door, I would too.
Hear hear. When my mom was dealing with end-stage cancer Ellen was the one show that lifted her spirits. Far from my cup of tea my I’m glad shows like this are still around.
That’s one theory. The other theory is that making 172 hours of television a year for 20 years is stressful and isolating from average life. Plus when you’re a cash cow, few people will call you on your descent into jerkdom until it’s too late. So even if the nice and kind was genuine in the beginning, unless you’re a remarkable person like Mr. Rogers it’s not going to last.
Mr Rogers was so good and kind and lived it 24/7 that of course cancer had to eat him alive and take him from us far too soon. The man was the very def of a unicorn.What’s more, he could and did enjoy the parodies of him and was not above adult humor, nor did he preach at people or thump them with a bible and he was a pastor too. He lived what he believed and i’m glad he and his wife are at peace now.Fuck cancer.
…and because it needs to be said more?FUCK CANCER.
What’s more, he could and did enjoy the parodies of him and was not above adult humorHis discussion of that on Letterman was typically wonderful and wholesome.
her work life was undoubtedly stressful and a lot of hours but she seemed to RUN after new projects, like her idiotic summer game shows, to the point that every time I saw her in a new game show I’d say out loud “wow Portia must really suck to be around LOL”. Either she’s an insane workaholic (probable) or she loves making insane amounts of money (who doesn’t) and I don’t see either one dying out any time soon.
I don’t know her or what the real story is, but it makes sense if you see it as a traumatic response. Being fired twice and without a definite role for a while, especially after having your own show, might have made her feel insecure even if she has achieved success. Armchair psychology, I know, and its not an excuse for being an asshole to others, but it also explains the sort of ingratiating and non-confrontational stance she has to people who (she sees) have the power to hurt her.
Part of it too could be her stand-up comedy background. Stand-ups tend to be all about the grind. Leno famously would host the Tonight Show and fly out on the weekends to do stand-up shows. A lot of comedians’ process involves hitting clubs during the week to flesh out new material, so it’s not a huge leap to think that when standups get successful they double down on the work ethic that got them there.
having heard a little about her shitty life (growing up gay in Louisiana, unsupportive parents, etc.), her attitude now seems uncomfortably like someone who was bullied now becoming the bully and LOVING it. Like you I’m just being an armchair psychologist, but some of the stuff she has done to celebrities (but never to people I assume she considers to be really powerful like W) has been really puzzling—getting Mariah Carey to admit to being pregnant when she clearly doesn’t want to? That bullshit with Dakota Johnson? At this point, if you’re on TV and seem excessively nice, I assume it’s an act LOL.
And let’s be honest, for the early to mid aughts, having her on daytime TV is A Big Deal for LGBT representation. Even if now we see that said representation is not very far reaching and somewhat tarnished, we can’t deny that her approachable demeanour made a lot of moms think “oh lesbians aren’t actually that scary”.
Yeah, tv is fake business, so everything outside of that is def going to disappoint.
I think it was more that she fostered a toxic workplace than she “tried too hard to seem wholesome,” but that’s just my two cents.
Was her selfie with George W Bush where it really started to fall apart for her? Because I always found her to be a bit patronizing and rude as a talk show host and it seemed only when that picture came out that people started to come down on her.
Nope, it was the story about how toxic she is behind the scenes to her employees.https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-07-27/ellen-tv-show-warner-bros-investigation-complaints-intimidation-racism
I’d argue that was more of the last nail in the coffin and that it was triggered by someone asking on Twitter about dirt on Ellen. I see a connected time-line here. In any event, so long farewell.
Eh, I see the George W Bush fiasco as a speedbump that she could have easily come back from.
But the selfie came years before, and for a lot of people was the first hint that maybe she’s not as nice and wholesome as we all thought. I agree the outpouring of stories in 2020 was the big nail in the coffin, though.
It didn’t help, that’s for sure. But like you, I’ve not been impressed with her as an interviewer from the jump. She talks over guests and doesn’t wait for them to answer questions.
don’t forget Dakota Johnson refusing to play along with Ellen’s “I’m the nicest person in the world!!” bullshit when she got caught in a lie, making for one of the cringier daytime moments in recent history (but in retrospect, it gave me a TON of respect for Dakota Johnson).
it’s an iconic celebrity moment.
I did look up the infamous Dakota Johnson interview because I couldn’t recall if it happened before or after the Dubya picture, in fact it did happen shortly after and it definitely added more to the narrative of “Ellen is a fake”
that was an extremely cringey 1-2 minute spot; also check out her interview with Mariah Carey when she kept pushing her (after having had problems getting pregnant I believe) to admit she was currently pregnant by drinking alcohol when she clearly was uncomfortable and didn’t want to. Even more than the “I never got an invitation to your party!” bullshit, this made me want to punch her in the face for laughing uproariously at Mariah’s obvious discomfort (and no I’m not a Mariah stan, it pisses me off when people take such great delight in tormenting people for shits and giggles, and as I recall the audience didn’t like it either).
People keep bring up the Dakota Johnson thing but to me it came off just as scripted as anything else on the show.
I think I read even as early as the writer’s strike in 07 that she got flak for crossing the picket line.
Every so often I forget why I now have a visceral negative reaction to Ellen, and yeah, the Bush selfie was absolutely the inflection point. Honestly it’s the same reason I can’t enjoy SNL anymore, with all the pro-war shit they pulled in the lead-up to the invasion. The coexistence of 9/11 and the Bush presidency totally gave this country persistent brain-rot.In the face of that bullshit, I honestly don’t care how important she is to LGBT rep in the US. I’m glad someone was there for it and put in the work, but 20 years later she was validating mass murder and imperialism, so she can just fuck off.
Good riddance. I’ve been waiting for this day after the report came out about how toxic she is behind the scenes.
You sound fun.
I was in a television pilot writing class last year and one of the writers had been a producer on ELLEN for a while. Apparently she was incredibly toxic, and the toxicity flowed downwards like a diarrhea river if this person was to be believed….
The cancellation of the sitcom “Ellen” is a source of much academic debate, actually. There are people who come down firmly in the camp of it being because of homophobia, but other people look at the numbers, the declining profitability of the show, and said it was due to ratings. Unless the executive who made the call talks about it, we’ll never know.
I was working in TV ad sales at the time, and yeah, the advertisers dropped out in droves due to her “controversial” gay identity after coming out. Network TV is all about the ad money. There were very few willing advertisers in the beginning of the talk show, but she proved that she could do comfort food programming, and they all came back after a little while.
Losing ad revenue because of controversy is of course different from a show just dropping in ratings because it’s not very good, or people have lost interest in it. There has been some speculation that the show stagnated because it was ONE thing for Ellen Morgan to come out and ANOTHER for Ellen Morgan to actively date a woman, and the writers didn’t know quite what to do about that. But if you know something, by all means, tell me for my book on the topic.
Good point. Backlash against her coming out vs. lost ratings/ad revenue are not mutually exclusive. That being said, I watched her sitcom, I think for most of its run, though like most 90s sitcoms I barely remember the details. I do remember having the impression that the post coming out season was much less funny, not because her dating women was less amusing but because there seemed to be less actual jokes (which may go to your “the writers didn’t know what to do” point). I was also a teenager at the time, though, so I can’t vouch for my tastes in humor back then.
In the 90’s, most gay characters were pretty asexual, in terms of displaying sexual interest, even if they had a long-term partner. Just showing them in bed together or to have them kiss was like, a big big deal that could cause sponsors to pull out. And sitcom jokes are often mild sex jokes, but it’s hard to have someone date on a 90s sitcom without any element of sexuality. So this was new territory beyond “she’s gay.”
some of the episodes really were too gay, though. i recall one where the world was gay and someone had to come out as straight….?sad, because it really was a great ensemble show.
I hadn’t thought about how difficult it would have been for any 90s sitcom (especially one revolving around someone who is single and dating) to essentially have to be PG (maybe even G) as far as the central character goes.
Shows about characters who were single eventually boiled down to “Who are they going to hook up with?” Which still, you know, happens a lot, because heteronormative society demands that unattached adults partner up and produce children in order to be happy. But considering Ellen could barely SAY she was gay (both in real life and on the show), actually exploring the logical repercussions in the lesbian dating scene was probably just a step too far without making it ridiculously sterile. At that time, gay characters were only allowed to be functionally asexual or flamboyantly gay, the second being considered a funny but generally disreputable thing to be. There was no middle. There was no, “These people are like straight people, in that they have romantic and sexual interests which are not necessarily extreme, except they’re gay.” Hence the gay best friend who makes comments but never gets his own serious plotline. Or the gay character who has no partner or no interest in having a partner, or the gay character who has AIDS or has a partner with AIDS and there’s no time for romance because, you know, dying of AIDS. It took a lot of letter-writing campaigns for non-niche markets to break the mold on that.
I remember a lot of people at the time saying they’d stopped watching it because it was “too gay now” and “everything is about being gay”
I liked the show somewhat, and I thought it was great that she came out, but it did seem like her sexual orientation was the main focus of the show afterwards. Sometimes you just want a standard sitcom story line about parking spaces or spilled coffee or a fight with the boss. Lesbians have all those problems too.
I mean, do you have the same problem with all the shows about straight characters?
I don’t think I’d watch a sitcom that was 100% about dating. Even Sex and the City had storylines about jobs and friendships.
Where did anyone say you should
Acutally, seriously, please email at djclawson at gmail because I would like to ask you some questions for my book. You’ll get thanked in the acknowledgments!
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I would say Ellen the person faced a huge amount of homophobia afterwards and had to really fight for herself. She also had to be the most likeable version of herself to be a palatable queer. I’m sure she had so much rage bottled up and it probably felt like a betrayal to herself to put that shit eating grin on for an audience that on some level were homophobic. I’m not saying the “mean Ellen” that came into existence the longer the show went on is ok, but I’m sure she was filled with resentments that sort of make sense.
Man, I dunno. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of her, but she was a genuinely important figure in LGBT representation, and it felt like people were a little too eager to gravedance when the reports came out. Like, “ah-ha, I KNEW something was up with that bitch!”
That had far less to do with her having Teh Gay (b/c a lot of gays piled on, too!) than it did her “nice girl” persona…who made nicey-nice with the likes of Shrub Bush and Cartman Warren.
Lots of people were betting that if her show had gone on another four-five years, she’d have had Trump(!!!) on to show what a great guy he was, really…
She was also a very, very, very good stand-up comic. I’m a more than a little bummed that she won’t be remembered for that aspect of her career because it really was the best aspect.
I watched her original sitcom (before and after the coming out) but didn’t know much of her standup before watching her “Relatable” special, which I thought was hilarious. Silver lining may be her returning to standup and incorporating the partial fall from grace into her material. Plus, she could in theory be uniquely qualified to do something in her stand-up that speaks on the trans-bashing trend given her analogous experiences in the 90s.
i hope she’d take on trans issues, but i really doubt it.
unfortunately, the generation of gay that she spearheaded was obsessed with assimilation, and a lot of people got left behind/left out. i mean, the HRC – straight people’s favourite gay organization at the time – had to be publicly shamed for excluding trans issues before they had a “change of heart.”
maybe she should’ve pretended standup mattered to her in the past two decades or something
Oh, please. Her stand-up was mediocre at best. Her strengths were not up on the mic but rather sitting next to someone and making connections.
I am old enough to remember her in the Young Comedian’s Specials. I swear I had a memory of her in a flowered yellow dress but a quick google search suggests my mind made up that detail… what I do remember is that she was really funny and could comedically hang with if not surpass her peers. Mildly curious as to her next chapter.
Then she shouldn’t have abandoned it.
I’ve been saying the same thing about Leticia Wright in Black Panther 2. I get the impression that racists/misogynists are laying the ground work that she’s an anti-vaxxer so they can bash the film if she becomes the new Black Panther.
The other day I noticed a bunch of people praising Tom Cruise on this site claiming they don’t care that he’s a scientologist etc. and it just stuns me how accepting audiences are of a white male actor having questionable beliefs verses a black female actor having said beliefs. I can see it coming from a mile away.
I’ve been saying the same thing about Leticia Wright in Black Panther 2.
I get the impression that racists/misogynists are laying the ground
work that she’s an anti-vaxxer so they can bash the film if she becomes
the new Black Panther.
No. Wright is an anti-vaxxer. Fact, not rumour.
Yes, I feel like the vitriol towards Wright feels extreme sometimes. Not like she doesn’t deserve to be criticized, just felt like people that didn’t care about covid that much all the sudden obsessed about removing her from the set.
Fuckity Bye!
and the world shrugged.
I cant believe people congratulating her on her career! Forgot what she has done to so many people? Bout time she gets off TV for good. No need to appear again! Good riddance
lets all pretend she is not a horrible person, shall we?
I stopped watching this after she did a quiz game one day. One of the quiz answers was having to know Ellen’s mom’s name. That hit me as just a little too self-centered.
“Twenty-five years ago, they canceled my sitcom because they didn’t want a lesbian to be in prime time once a week.”
They canceled the sitcom because it went from being a pretty funny, somewhat generic 90s sitcom to being about GAY how GAY Ellen can GAY live in GAY this life GAY now GAY that GAY she’s GAY come out GAY of GAY the GAY closet GAY.
It wasn’t a comedy anymore, it was just a show about a gay woman who was constantly reminding everyone in the scene that she was gay.
Well…Bye.
Good fucking riddance. I can’t believe her show stayed on this long after so many people working for her said she’s a monster to work for.
Trying to make a pregnant woman drink wine on TV, classy. And childish things like this probably got her a lot of enemies