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Ellen DeGeneres’s Relatability Crisis

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“I’m a good person,” Ellen DeGeneres says in her standup special “Relatable,” which came out on Netflix at the end of 2018. “I know I am. But I’m a human being, and I have bad days.” This wasn’t an apology for some perceived offense but a mild pushback against her genial public persona, epitomized by DeGeneres’s sign-off on her daytime talk show: “Be kind to one another.” In “Relatable,” she says of the catchphrase, “It’s a wonderful thing, it is. But here’s the downside: I can never do anything unkind ever now. Ever. I’m the ‘be kind’ girl.”In the year and a half since, DeGeneres’s be-kind brand has taken one hit after another, culminating, this past month, in an all-out revolt by the present and former staff of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” A cash cow that has been on the air for seventeen seasons, the show has a spirit of altruistic fun: pranks, games, giveaways, and, above all, the sunny disposition of its host. But it doesn’t appear to be a happy place to work. In April, members of the show’s union crew expressed outrage that there had been no communication about hours or pay during quarantine, while DeGeneres hired non-union technicians to set up a remote broadcast from her home. In mid-July, Krystie Lee Yandoli , at Buzzfeed, that DeGeneres stood atop an office culture of “racism, fear, and intimidation.” Former employees claimed that they were fired for going on medical leave or for taking bereavement days to attend a funeral. A Black woman said that a producer had told her and a Black co-worker, “Oh, wow, you both have box braids; I hope we don’t get you confused.” WarnerMedia, the parent company of the show’s production company, an internal investigation.Days later, DeGeneres wrote a to her staff taking responsibility and promising changes, saying that she had vowed from the start to make the show a “place of happiness.” But any damage control was upstaged by another by Yandoli, containing allegations of sexual misconduct against the show’s brain trust. Ex-employees accused the head writer and executive producer, Kevin Leman, of groping staff members and of soliciting sexual favors at an office party. (Leman denied the claims.) Another executive producer, Ed Glavin, was said to be “handsy with women” in the control room and to use intimidation tactics, such as closing his door remotely by using a desk button—a gadget that should have disappeared with Matt Lauer. (Glavin did not return a request for comment.) The dozens of employees who spoke to Yandoli were split on whether DeGeneres had been insulated from the problems or had purposely turned a blind eye. At best, she comes off as a distant boss who set a chilly backstage tone.Since then, rumors have flown: that Glavin is being ousted, that DeGeneres might call it quits, that her time slot might go to . Maybe DeGeneres will right the ship, or maybe she’ll bail. Either way, the reports amount to a crisis of authenticity for her public image, which was already complicated and compromised. DeGeneres has made niceness her defining value, and yet, like Senator Amy Klobuchar, who based her political brand on Midwestern folksiness but has faced of bad-boss behavior, she’s been dogged by tales of not-niceness. (Niceness, of course, is something we expect more of from female bosses.) In late March, the comedian Kevin T. Porter put a call out on for “the most insane stories you’ve heard about Ellen being mean.” Nearly three thousand replies came in, from supposedly brushed-off fans and un-thanked production assistants. The thread was a little mean itself, and the responses have varying credibility. But the exercise was reminiscent of a line in “Mean Girls”: “How many of you have ever felt personally victimized by Regina George?” More than most anything, a television personality such as DeGeneres needs to come across as genuine to a broad viewership; a two-faced Ellen won’t play. Her audiences, celebrity guests, and sponsors want to reflect her nonthreatening warmth. They want to be part of her goofy dance.The fact that DeGeneres carved out such an accessible persona is a small miracle, after her tumultuous first act. She made her name in the eighties, as a standup comedian with a friendly New Orleans drawl, a casual J. C. Penney aesthetic, and a knack for everyday absurdism. In her breakout routine, which she on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show,” she makes a phone call to God to inquire about the purpose of fleas. (In “Relatable,” she reveals that she came up with the bit after her girlfriend was killed in a car accident and she couldn’t afford to live in their place alone, so she moved into a ratty basement apartment infested with fleas.) Her ABC sitcom, which débuted in 1994, as “These Friends of Mine,” and was retitled “Ellen,” was about a perennially single bookstore owner with a bunch of kooky friends. The series would be remembered today as an amiable “Seinfeld” ripoff were it not for the title character’s historic coming out, in 1997—an event that most every gay person who was watching, including me, can still feel in the gut. The real-life Ellen came out simultaneously, on the cover of Time, and her niceness doubled as a kind of survival mechanism: for many Americans, her friendly face was the first they could attach to an openly gay person. There’s no way around the fact that DeGeneres was a pioneer, with all the sacrifices that that entails. Her sexuality was endlessly deconstructed and condemned, her show was cancelled, and she entered a depression.“The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” which premièred in 2003, was, in some ways, just as groundbreaking as her sitcom, since it repositioned DeGeneres as the fun-loving lesbian next door whom Middle America could welcome into its living rooms. This wasn’t always easy. In “Relatable,” she says that she had to “tone it down” and wear feminine necklaces for the first few seasons, and that one station manager had balked, “No one’s going to watch a lesbian during the day.” With her significant help, however, mainstream culture had made major strides, with “Will &amp; Grace,” “Queer as Folk,” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” on television. As a daytime host, DeGeneres could circle back to the un-edgy humor of her early standup: she was safe, she was likeable, and she gave stuff away for free. Her marriage to the actress Portia De Rossi only reinforced her warm, domesticated image. The show was wildly successful, and DeGeneres became one of the most highly paid celebrities in the world.By 2018, she was making an eighty-seven million dollars a year (much of which she gave to charities, and she and De Rossi began a ). But mind-boggling wealth made her tightrope act even trickier. In “Relatable,” her first standup special in fifteen years, she tried to reconcile the gulf between familiarity and privilege. “Do you think you’re still relatable?” she recalls a friend asking her, then imagines her butler coming into the library to tell her that her breakfast is ready. She makes Seinfeldian observations about how we all try to squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste, but then jokes that she likes to use gold bars to flatten the tube. The special allowed DeGeneres to show her spikier side, but it was also a canny exercise in brand maintenance. By then, anonymous reports of her brusque behavior at work were circulating in the tabloids. In a fascinating by Jason Zinoman, headlined “Ellen DeGeneres Is Not as Nice as You Think,” she said of the rumors, “That bugs me if someone is saying that, because it’s an outright lie.”Over the next year, two mini-scandals tested her warm-and-friendly reputation. In January, 2019, she invited the comedian Kevin Hart on her show to fend off over homophobic jokes he had made, which resurfaced on Twitter after he was announced as the host of the Academy Awards. DeGeneres urged him, “Don’t let those people win—host the Oscars.” (Hart wound up offering half-hearted apologies and bowing out of the Oscars gig.) Instead of quelling the outrage, the appearance made it spill over to DeGeneres, who seemed to have appointed herself the Gay Pardoner while many in the L.G.B.T.Q. community remained upset. Who were “those people,” anyway? She seemed to have more sympathy for a fellow-celebrity than for her gay audience. Then, in October, DeGeneres was spotted watching a Texas football game from a luxury box alongside George W. Bush, who had campaigned against same-sex marriage during his Presidency. She defended herself from criticism on her show, saying, “Just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them.” Vox if the incident pointed to a “death of uncritical niceness.”It’s possible to view both incidents as extensions, however tone-deaf, of her personal philosophy: be kind to everyone, no matter what. And it could be that DeGeneres, a victim of literal cancel culture back in the nineties, couldn’t abide what she saw as the angry maw of Twitter. But it also seemed that she had fallen prey to the very élitism that she had poked fun at in “Relatable.” A creed of universal kindness rings hollow if it favors other famous people over those whom they’ve hurt. This week, her exoneration of Hart appeared to pay itself forward, when he (along with other celebrity friends, including Jay Leno and Ashton Kutcher) came to DeGeneres’s defense, writing on Instagram, “The internet has become a crazy world of negativity.” What both parties surely see as friendship is difficult to distinguish from mutual P.R.-crisis management, a way of closing ranks against the anonymous masses. Super not relatable.Misguided comity is one thing. Presiding over a toxic workplace is another. If DeGeneres wants to win back the trust of her audience—and her staff—she’ll need to earn it from the people who don’t have publicists and verified Instagram accounts, first among them the employees who took the risk of speaking out. It would be a shame if the accusations overshadowed DeGeneres’s consequential career, which really did change the world for the better. The bigger shame would be if the accusations are justified., a staff writer, has contributed to The New Yorker since 2006. He is the author of “.”What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week.

“I’m a good person,” Ellen DeGeneres says in her standup special “Relatable,” which came out on Netflix at the end of 2018. “I know I am. But I’m a human being, and I have bad days.” This wasn’t an apology for some perceived offense but a mild pushback against her genial public persona, epitomized by DeGeneres’s sign-off on her daytime talk show: “Be kind to one another.” In “Relatable,” she says of the catchphrase, “It’s a wonderful thing, it is. But here’s the downside: I can never do anything unkind ever now. Ever. I’m the ‘be kind’ girl.”In the year and a half since, DeGeneres’s be-kind...

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Michael Schulman

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Ellen DeGeneres’s Relatability Crisis

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