The farewell episode of "Ellen" clearly demonstrates exactly why the show's ratings dropped this season and ABC canceled it.
The hour is ponderous, self-important, heavy-handed, obsessed with sexual orientation and just plain not funny.DeGeneres can complain all she wants about how ABC has failed to support her show. She can make herself look silly by whining about how her show was incompatible with the show that precedes it, "Drew Carey." (Look at ABC's schedule - what show would be a compatible lead-in?)
The audience deserted "Ellen" because they were tired of being beaten over the head with DeGeneres' agenda. And perhaps they were expecting laughs out of a comedy - something "Ellen" hasn't been able to provide.
The series finale (Wednesday at 8 p.m. on Ch. 4) takes the form of a retrospective. But "Ellen: A Hollywood Tribute" is a parody that looks back at DeGeneres' fictional career, dating to her vaudeville days in the '20s, on through her radio days and the premiere of her sitcom "Ellen" in 1959.
Newswoman Linda Ellerbee hosts this fake retrospective, which is big on the "ground-breaking" aspects of DeGeneres and "Ellen." It casts "Ellen" in the same light as "I Love Lucy" and "All in the Family" - comparisons that are completely conceited and entirely inappropriate.
"I Love Lucy" set the standard for all sitcoms that followed. "All in the Family" proved that you can tackle social issues in a thought-provoking, heartfelt and hilarious way.
But while "Ellen" did indeed become the first sitcom on a broadcast network in which the main character was gay, it was never the kind of quality show that would have stood out without that gimmick. And, while the issue of gay rights is certainly a serious one (no matter how you feel about it), on "Ellen" homosexuality played out like a gimmick.
It wasn't Ellen Morgan coming out of the closet that ruined "Ellen," it was the fact that the series became obsessed with that fact. DeGeneres and the show's writers and producers were so committed to making the show "ground-breaking" that their tunnel vision made it unwatchable.
As in a series of heavy-handed parodies in Wednesday's finale:
- A parody of "I Love Lucy" in which DeGeneres compares lesbianism with the fact that, back in the '50s, Lucy and Ricky couldn't say the word "pregnant."
- A parody of '50s game shows, including one titled "Who's the Commie?" supposedly hosted by DeGeneres - drawing the comparison between gay rights and the communist witch hunts.
- Talking about her alleged show in the '60s, she compared her struggle to that decade's issues - racism, war, unrest.
"I was determined to change the show to reflect what was going on," DeGeneres says.
There are also a good many shots at ABC. (The episode was taped before the official cancellation, but the handwriting was on the wall.) There are a number of clips from early "Ellen" episodes in which Ellen Morgan was getting frisky with boyfriends as Ellerbee talks about how sexy the show was.
"As I recall, the network wanted to pull the plug," Ellerbee says.
"And then ABC learned a lesson. Unlike television executives, many Americans like sex," DeGeneres says.
When the discussion gets around to the coming-out episode, De-Gen-eres deadpans that the real news wasn't that she is a lesbian - it was that she was 35 years old.
"That's just the spin the network put on it. They're gay crazy over there," she says.
And DeGeneres pounds viewers once again with her agenda in the final minutes, "discounting" the idea that her show was ground-breaking television.
"Not really. No more ground-breaking than it was to say `pregnant' on television. Twenty years from now, it's going to be one big fat `So what?' " she says.
"Well I guess I missed the whole point," Ellerbee says.
"Don't worry about it," De-Gen-eres replies. "It was subtle."
Unfortunately, nothing about "Ellen" is subtle.
It's possible to do social commentary within comedy - to enlighten while you entertain. But neither DeGeneres nor her writers ever figured out how to do that.
Instead, the audience was beaten over the head with episodes like, "It's a Gay, Gay, Gay World" - when Spence dreamed that the world was mostly gay and straight people were unusual.
For all its posturing, "Ellen" never treated homosexuality as an everyday occurrence. It was as if Ellen Morgan discovered les-bi-an-ism.
Ellen Morgan was not, of course, the first gay character to appear in a weekly television series. It's been done many times before, from the cable series "Brothers" to "Love, Sidney" to "Soap" to contemporary series like "Cybill," "Melrose Place," "Spin City," "Party of Five," "Veronica's Closet," "NYPD Blue" and "ER."
And if you endorse or even accept DeGeneres' notion that she was fighting to make television a more gay-friendly environment, then she may have done more harm than good. A huge number of people tuned in to see the coming-out episode, but the majority of them deserted the show - something TV programmers will no doubt remember.
"Ellen" may have left TV a less hospitable place for gays.
In a "PrimeTime Live" interview last week, DeGeneres said that she'd rather be a pioneer than keep her show on the air.
"If I just had this one year of doing what I did on television, I'll take that over 10 more years being on a sitcom and just being funny," she said.
She made her choice. She ought to quit blaming others for what happened because of it.