By Michele Yeo
“Let me catch you up on what’s been going on with me since you saw me last…. Oh yeah, I got kicked out of show business.”
So says Ellen DeGeneres, without a hint of irony, on stage, in front of thousands of people – including the all-mighty Oprah – taping a special for a streaming service with more than 278 million paid subscribers across more than 190 countries. We should all hope to be kicked out our respective industries in such fashion.
Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval, now streaming on Netflix, is both the comedian’s comeback and farewell special. It’s the first we’re seeing of or hearing from DeGeneres since she wrapped up her wildly successful daytime talk show in 2022 amid damning accusations of her show being a toxic workplace behind the scenes. While most of the accusations were levelled against the show’s executive producers and other senior managers, the general sentiment was that Ellen wilfully turned a blind eye to the day-to-day toxicity on the show that bore her name. When The Ellen DeGeneres Show‘s final episode aired on May 26th, 2022, it faced a complicated legacy despite its 19 years of award-winning success.
This new standup special feels like Ellen’s last-ditch effort to restore that legacy more than any kind of need or desire to share her comedy with the world one last time. Yes, as promised, Ellen does “go there” but not in any kind of meaningful way. Despite having two years to reflect on her being “kicked out of show business” she lacks any kind of contrition and still positions herself as a victim to whom a career cancellation happened, rather than taking any responsibility for her role, however large or small, in it.
“I never wanted to be a boss,” Ellen tells the crowd. “I mean, it looked like I was the boss. The show was called Ellen and everyone was wearing t-shirts that said Ellen and there were buildings all over the Warner Brothers lot that said Ellen but I don’t think that meant that I should be in charge,” says, adding, “I don’t think that Ronald McDonald is the CEO of McDonalds.” The crowd laughs but it feels like the ultimate shirking of responsibility. After all, isn’t most conventional wisdom about organizations is that the workplace culture funnels from the top down?
She goes on to imply that her gender contributed to some of the allegations, that women, especially assertive ones, are held to a different, ultimately higher standard in the workplace and while that’s certainly true, it’s difficult not to see it as a copout. “We have all these unwritten rules based on gender of acceptable behaviour, of who we’re allowed to be and how we’re allowed to act,” she explains, “and if we don’t follow these rules, it makes people uncomfortable and when people are uncomfortable, there are consequences.”
Ellen continues to miss the point when she implies the consequences, she faced were more severe because of her decision to end every episode of her show by asking people to be kind to one another, setting herself up for unrealistic standards of nice she was expected to be. “The Be Kind girl wasn’t kind – that was the headline,” she says, “had I ended my show by saying go fuck yourselves, people would have been pleasantly surprised to find out I’m kind.” But wasn’t the issue that she wasn’t actually kind? That she could actually be somewhat of a tyrant? Whether the accusations are true or not, it seems disingenuous to suggest your show’s tagline is what positioned you a target for backlash.
Ellen says she’s come to a place in her life where she has relinquished how much power public perception has over her saying, “I’ve cared far too much what people think of me so the thought of anyone thinking I’m mean was devastating to me and it consumed me for a long time but with time you gain perspective which is one good thing about ageing.” But the lady doth protest too much, methinks. It seems obvious For Your Approval is, well, an attempt to get our approval, to scrub our collective memories of how and why her talk show ended.
When Ellen isn’t tackling “the incident” she’s back to the observational comedy that made her famous – waxing about things like the stresses of parallel parking in front of people, how gardening isn’t as exciting as one thinks, how pigeons have fallen from grace from their previous positions as carriers, and the challenges of ageing. The problem is, none of it is all that funny. Like Jerry Seinfeld before her who rose to fame with his own observations about the most inconsequential and mundane parts of daily life, it can be difficult relating to someone who now has more money than we’ll ever see in our lives. Ellen’s lack of contrition in For Your Approval could maybe be overlooked if the special was funnier but unfortunately, just isn’t.
The special kicks off with Ellen getting ready backstage. As she makes her way to the stage, a montage of Ellen’s career highlights is shown: from her landmark appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, her five-season sitcom, her history-making coming out, landing her talk show, and receiving a Medal of Freedom Award from then President Barack Obama. There’s no denying Ellen’s accomplishments are vast and impressive and that her mark on pop culture, particularly her contributions to LGBTQ2+ acceptance, indelible, but if she wasn’t going to use For Your Approval to demonstrate to audiences that she has an even modicum of understanding about why she was “kicked out of show business” if it was just an attempt to remind us of why we loved her in the first place, one wonders if she should have just left well enough alone.
