Usually when a TV show goes on its regularly scheduled summer hiatus, the break provides much needed time to slow down a bit, rest and perhaps reconfigure a few things so that everyone comes back to work in the fall rejuvenated and ready to hit the ground running.
The Ellen DeGeneres Show didn’t have a restful summer hiatus. Though the public has been promised a reconfiguration.
Perhaps fitting for a year in which the world feels hopelessly upside down, the Daytime Emmy-amassing talk show host whose personal brand is rooted in generosity and kindness came under fire for presiding over a historically toxic work environment, one that didn’t go unnoticed by some of the celebrities who have passed through her studio over the years since Ellen premiered in 2003.
While it wasn’t DeGeneres who was accused of any specific egregious behavior, she was called out for seemingly being too above it all and out of reach to her workaday staff to know (or, some say, care) what was going on behind the scenes of her hugely successful show.
At the same time, numerous people—those who count her as a friend and others who’ve merely crossed paths—have come to the entertainer’s defense, saying they’ve had nothing but positive interactions with DeGeneres and Ellen, which kicks off its 18th season today.
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While at one point this summer there was speculation Ellen might not come back at all, that DeGeneres would take the controversy as her cue to pack it in despite being renewed through 2022, the show has gone on—albeit a couple weeks behind schedule, the season premiere originally slotted for Sept. 9.
But, once again befitting 2020, what production hasn’t had to change gears as it figures out how to navigate a pandemic-affected new normal?
In mid-March, like pretty much every other show that taped in front of an audience, Ellen shut down in-studio production, DeGeneres passing the time before filming resumed—with a skeleton crew, interviewing guests remotely—posting funny bits online showing her lolling around the house and making casual phone calls to the likes of similarly homebound Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel.
The backlash was swift.
Not against DeGeneres specifically, but against the rich and famous in general, as many regular folks decried those who were riding out stay-at-home orders in spacious homes with pools and walk-in closets, with a nanny or two on hand to help care for the kids or at least no worries whatsoever about where their next paycheck was coming from, for daring to have anything resembling a complaint about their present circumstances. (The “Imagine” mash-up featuring numerous celebrities singing a few bars each of the John Lennon classic that Gal Gadot shared on March 18, which decidedly was not received the way the Wonder Woman star must have envisioned it would be, may have been the tipping point.)
Let’s just say, fuses were short and real life was starting to resemble the panic that’s so ubiquitous online when, on March 20, podcaster Kevin T. Porter tweeted, “Right now we all need a little kindness. You know, like Ellen Degeneres always talks about! She’s also notoriously one of the meanest people alive. Respond to this with the most insane stories you’ve heard about Ellen being mean & I’ll match every one w/ $2 to @LAFoodBank.”
So, that went viral, and two days later Porter followed up with, “Well this got out of hand! It’s now hard to tell which stories are real or not, so I’ve rounded up to 300 and donated $600!”
Dots were quick connected and it turned out Porter had an issue with DeGeneres for awhile, having posted a scathing response last year to the photo of her sitting next to former President George W. Bush at a football game in October. Or, more expressly, his response was to what the talk show host said about the reactions to the picture (which rubbed some people the wrong way for a variety of reasons), including, “When I say, ‘Be kind to one another,’ I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do. I mean be kind to everyone—doesn’t matter.”
Porter wrote on Medium, “Over the course of a career built ostensibly on a comedy of empathy, DeGeneres has in reality reduced the idea of having character to a marketing strategy, diminishing ‘kindness’ to a dinky parlor trick deployed for status and profit. Along the way, she’s actually been rather, well, unkind.” He mentioned a “decades-old Los Angeles whisper network of people who have encountered a cruel DeGeneres off camera, either in passing or in her employment. The stories have never risen to tarnishing her national image but dog her enough to have warranted a curiously vacant on-the-record denial.”
He linked out to a December 2018 New York Times profile of DeGeneres, in which, referring to rumors that she wasn’t always nice to people she works with, she said, “That bugs me if someone is saying that because it’s an outright lie. The first day I said: ‘The one thing I want is everyone here to be happy and proud of where they work, and if not, don’t work here.’ No one is going to raise their voice or not be grateful. That’s the rule to this day.”