With the announcement on Wednesday that she will end her long-running talk show next year, Ellen DeGeneres is stepping down from her biggest platform in a career that began at a comedy club in New Orleans and led her to more than 30 Emmys and the presidential medal of of Freedom and included a late stage where she adopted Be Kind as the motto and brand name for products she sold to her fans.
Her decision followed a sharp drop in ratings for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” also known as “Ellen,” which is in its 18th season. It has lost more than a million viewers since September, a bigger drop than any of its competitors this television season.
At the top of her field, Ms. DeGeneres, 63, brought in roughly the same number of viewers as Maury Povich and Kelly Clarkson, daytime presenters who did not compete with her until recently. “Ellen” averaged 1.4 million viewers in the 2020-21 season, a 44 percent decrease from 2.6 million last season, according to Nielsen.
The drop seems to have had an impact on the bottom line. The show generated $ 127.6 million in advertising revenue between September and February, according to research firm Kantar. That was a 22 percent decrease from $ 163.8 million in the same six months last season, a 22 percent decrease.
The slide began shortly after BuzzFeed News reported in July that several former and current employees said they had encountered “racism, fear and intimidation” at work. Several employees also said the producers sexually molested them. Three senior producers were sacked following an investigation by Warner Bros., the company that produced the show.
Ms. DeGeneres apologized to her staff over the summer when the show was suspended. When she returned to the air in September, she addressed her audience: “I learned that things happen here that should never have happened. I take this very seriously. And I want to say that those affected are so sorry. “
This episode achieved the highest rating for “Ellen” in four years. Then the audience switched off.
The apology in the air was also a rare moment of seriousness in a program known for its uninterrupted ease. It’s been a daily hour of light jokes, freebies, and gossip chats with Hollywood A-listeners for the last 18 years. Celebrities like Beyoncé, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Lange, Madonna, John Travolta, and Barack and Michelle Obama made their silliest moves while dancing with the star of the show.
“Ellen” was a natural result of Ms. DeGeneres’ stand-up act. It started out as a light-hearted comic with an absurd trail, a rare character whose jokes were family-friendly in the tumultuous macho comedy world of the 1980s, when the noisy Sam Kinison, Eddie Murphy and Andrew Dice Clay drew the crowd.
Quietly, she was a pioneer at the beginning of her career. In 1986, Ms. DeGeneres became the first comedian to debut The Tonight Show and was invited by Johnny Carson to sit at his desk, a gesture of respect. More importantly, when she starred on the hit ABC sitcom “Ellen” in 1997, she announced she was gay.
It is an almost forgotten part of her story that her decision to publicly declare her sexual identity almost ended her career. Years after her sitcom went dark, Ms. DeGeneres was still at rock bottom. Jim Paratore, an executive at Telepictures, which was part of Warner Bros., believed she had what it takes to be successful on television during the day. Local TV station managers initially disagreed.
“I wasn’t an easy sale. They told me I couldn’t identify with housewives, ”Ms. DeGeneres said in a 2012 interview with the New York Times. “Jim wouldn’t accept that.”
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Mr. Paratore introduced it to people at stations across the country, affiliates agreed to wear “Ellen” – and it was a hit that often drew audiences of around three million.
As the show went on, her host showed more sides of herself. After the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a gay college student who was bullied, Ms. DeGeneres adopted her catchphrase and ended each episode with the words “Be Kind to Each Other.”
Being a child of Ellen became a mini-industry. Be Kind subscribers who pay $ 197.96 per year will receive four boxes, one for each season, filled with products from socially or environmentally conscious brands. The Be Kind Box now available contains “ice ball facial massagers” from Aceology, a vegan leather shoulder bag from Samara and a reusable water bottle from Fill It Forward. The products are selected by Ms. DeGeneres.
The complaints about the workplace “Ellen” seemed to contradict the public image of the hostess, and she was suddenly criticized. Social media users scoured the footage of her interviews to find harsh remarks she’d made to celebrity guests as if they were bringing evidence that the kindness was a ploy.
She noted all of this in her apology on the air and told viewers, “To be known as a Be Kind Lady is a difficult position. Let me give you some advice. If someone is thinking of changing their title or giving themselves a nickname, then don’t go with the Be Kind Lady. “
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday, Ms. DeGeneres denied that the workplace allegations had anything to do with her departure, saying she had known for a long time that 2022 would be the final year of her talk show.
She had actually hinted at pulling the plug in recent years. In a 2018 interview with The Times, she suggested she was tired of always putting on a happy face and said she was ready to leave the show until her brother, comedian Vance DeGeneres, stopped her persuaded to go ahead and arguing these people took a break from the volatility of the Trump years.
She signed a new contract until 2022. She also signed a separate contract with Warner Media to create shows for the HBO Max streaming platform, among other things. Then it got difficult.
The pandemic likely didn’t help reviews for “Ellen”. The restrictions forced Ms. DeGeneres to broadcast from her hometown last year and deprived her of interacting with an often boisterous studio audience. She was back at her Warner Bros. studio this season but has played on big TV screens with images of viewers watching from home.
“Though all good things have to end, you still have the hope that the really big things will never end,” said Mike Darnell, president of Warner Bros.’s non-written television division, in a statement Wednesday. “‘The Ellen Show’ started out as the little program that could and would become an absolute phenomenon.”
He added, “It was and is an indelible piece of the television landscape and it will be sorely missed.”
Ms. DeGeneres was more than easy to get along with right from the start. When she made her career debut on The Tonight Show in 1986, she started with a joke that seemed harmless enough at first.
Setup: “My grandmother started running five miles a day when she was 60 years old.”
Punchline: “She’s 97 today and we don’t know where the hell she is.”
Laugh. Applause.
And then came the kicker: “I’m kidding. We know where she is. She is in jail. “
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