Stand-up comedy is a complex skill that takes years to perfect—and still, much of what we see on streaming services could be better. Which doesn’t mean I don’t watch most of these specials when they hit Netflix. Maybe I am a glutton for punishment, but I cannot count the number of times I have pressed play and sat straight-faced for an hour, barely cracking a smile. So last week, when Ellen DeGeneres released a new special—her first in 15 years—called For Your Approval, I had no choice but to watch.
Ellen DeGeneres started out as a stand-up comedian in New Orleans before going to Hollywood to star in an ABC sitcom titled Ellen (or retitled—for the first season, which premiered in spring 1994, it was called These Friends of Mine until the success of NBC’s Friends that fall necessitated a rebrand). Three years into the show’s run, news leaked that DeGeneres planned to have Ellen Morgan, her TV alter ego, come out as gay in an upcoming episode, which would make her the first non-straight series lead in US network TV history; DeGeneres then confirmed to The Oprah Winfrey Show and Time magazine that both she and Ellen Morgan were gay.
After that series—and another sitcom, The Ellen Show—ended, she went on to host The Ellen DeGeneres Show for 19 seasons. It was your typical daytime talk show: comedy, celebrity interviews, musical guests, and crowd participation games. Her significant addition to the format was her weird dancing, which everyone seemed to love. She also ended every show with the exhortation “Be kind to one another,” which would be cheesy and innocuous but now seems more than a little bit ironic.
Ellen was, it has been widely alleged, a mean boss. In 2020, at the height of cancel culture, 10 former employees described The Ellen DeGeneres Show as a toxic and racist work environment in a Buzzfeed News story; a tweet soliciting Ellen horror stories went wildly viral. The show’s ratings crashed, and in 2021 DeGeneres announced that she’d be leaving after the next season; her final episode featured Jennifer Aniston, Billie Eilish, and Pink. Ellen is very, very rich and used her television money to become a low-key real estate mogul, buying and selling multimillion-dollar properties. So when the world turned on her, she could have easily ridden off into the sunset and lived happily ever after with Portia de Rossi in a giant compound in Montecito, enjoying salty air and a bounty of fresh California produce.
Instead, she made For Your Approval, which is made up primarily of lackluster observational bits about failing at parallel parking, sweatpants, and how annoying windshield wipers are. Classic Ellen stuff, except now Ellen is superfamous, and continually reminds us of this—the sweatpants bit involves an invitation to dine with Mick Jagger; and there’s another, separate anecdote about an Usher party—in a manner indicative of a broader lack of self-awareness. She does tackle the controversy in some ways, but mostly pleads ignorance—she was but a simple comedian, thrust into the role of manager—and blames her OCD and ADD. The number of applause breaks she receives was so staggering that it went viral.
She got Netflix to foot the bill for an attempt at redemption while seemingly fishing for praise. No laughs in evidence. So why couldn’t she leave well enough alone? I always think of an incident during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Kardashians went on a remote tropical beach vacation and posted about it on social media. They got tons of flak online, and all I could think about was how easily avoidable it could have been. Go on the trip—just turn your phone off. You can still do things without documenting them. Ellen didn’t need to take a check from Netflix to attempt redemption.
Fame is more powerful than money, but even more powerful is the need to be liked and accepted. Even civilians like myself suffer from that. Ellen claims she’s retiring and this will be the last thing we see from her, which is probably for the best. I can’t get that hour back, but maybe she can finally ride off into the sunset now.
