Almost every day from 2010 to 2012, I would walk from my high school in Alberta across the street and down the block home for lunch.
My mom would be waiting on the other end with a grilled cheese or something like it and we’d sit down and watch The Ellen DeGeneres Show together. The daytime talk show, which launched in 2003, aired every day at noon, which perfectly aligned with my lunch break.
This was during the height of Ellen DeGeneres’ fame. She was riding high making viral moments and subjecting celebrities to silly games. Sophia Grace and Rosie were interviewing celebrities; Ellen’s sidekick Stephen “tWitch” Boss was leading dance parties, and Ellen encouraged people to be kind and just dance, glowingly sharing with the world her many dogs and her digestible brand of middle-aged white queerness.
Sitting there with my grilled cheese, watching my mom talk about how happy Ellen and wife Portia de Rossi looked made little ol’ closeted me think that maybe one day I could come out, too.
On Wednesday, nearly a decade since I stopped walking home from high school to watch her at lunch, DeGeneres announced that the upcoming 19th season of The Ellen DeGeneres Show would be her last. Over the past 18 years, the show has gone from a ratings juggernaut—and spiritual successor to the Oprah Winfrey show—to a production marred by controversy, declining ratings and a Dakota Johnson meme that just won’t quit.
The end of Ellen seemed foretold, and DeGeneres herself agrees.
“When you’re a creative person, you constantly need to be challenged—and as great as this show is, and as fun as it is, it’s just not a challenge anymore,” DeGeneres told The Hollywood Reporter this week about the decision.
“Look, it’s going to be really hard on the last day, but I also know it’s time.”
After breaking out on the sitcom Ellen in the late nineties—and coming out as a lesbian in a groundbreaking 1997 Time magazine cover—DeGeneres pivoted to the daytime talk show circuit six years later with The Ellen DeGeneres Show. During its run, the show has received 171 Daytime Emmy Award nominations, winning 61 of them. It was also a ratings steamroller for most of its run, and broke many records previously set by the gold standard of daytime talk, The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Featuring celebrity interviews, contests, games and plenty of dancing, The Ellen DeGeneres Show distilled its queer trailblazing host for the middle-of-the-road daytime talk show audience. Between Price Is Right reruns and Dr. Phil, there was Ellen, smiling, dancing and reminding people to be kind to one another.
For many people (myself included), the sanitized public image of DeGeneres and de Rossi was one of our first exposures to queerness in the mainstream—a soft butch in sensible shoes and her hot actress wife, with their sprawling estate filled with rescue animals. DeGeneres normalized a certain brand of queerness to heterosexual folks across America, essentially saying, “We gays, we’re just like you!”
DeGeneres said she wanted to end the show as far back as season 16, but was talked into signing on for three more seasons.
“We [settled] on three more years and I knew that would be my last. That’s been the plan all along,” she said.
The show almost came to a grinding halt in the summer of 2020, after a BuzzFeed News investigation found widespread issues of abuse and bullying—including from DeGeneres herself—behind the scenes. DeGeneres told The Hollywood Reporter the findings almost brought down the show.
“It almost impacted the show. It was very hurtful to me. I mean, very. But if I was quitting the show because of that, I wouldn’t have come back this season,” she said. “So, it’s not why I’m stopping, but it was hard.”
DeGeneres apologized during the most recent season’s premiere in September, and pledged to rectify the issues outlined in the BuzzFeed report. Still, the show lost nearly a million viewers as ratings plunged in the wake of the controversy. Ellen also faced criticism for her activities outside of the show, like cozying up to a certain former war-mongering president named George H.W. Bush. DeGeneres’ friendship with Bush was memorably captured in the cultural memory when actress Dakota Johnson appeared on her show.
In short: Ellen jokingly called out Johnson for not inviting her to Johnson’s birthday party. Johnson, in an iconic moment of television history said, “No, that’s not the truth Ellen.” It turns out she was invited, but chose to watch a football game with ol’ Bush that weekend.
The clip has become a meme in itself, and the awkward interchange between Johnson and DeGeneres is emblematic of the cultural conversation around the talk show host in recent years. The end of her show feels like it comes at the right time: A 63-year-old rich, white lesbian who casually hangs out with historically shitty presidents is no longer the face of public queerness we need—not when there’s a whole generation of queer folks bringing forward new conversations around gender and identity that are as groundbreaking as DeGeneres herself was back in 1997.
Ellen opened the door for conversations about queerness for me and so many other queer youth growing up in the early aughts. She provided a model we could point to and say “I want to be that.” But now, we have new models of a more nuanced queerness in the public eye.
And let’s be real, DeGeneres is not really gone. She still has her name and brand on a slew of gameshows and the new HBO Max competitive furniture design show (because all lesbians find their way to woodworking eventually). Her empire and brand is huge, and she says that, after some time off to “sit still,” she’ll be exploring other acting or comedic opportunities.
“I don’t look at this as the end at all. It’s the start of a new chapter and hopefully my fans will go with me wherever I go,” DeGeneres said. “That being said, if I never do anything else ever again, I’m so proud of what this show stood for and still stands for and what we’ve made it through.”
And for those of us looking for even more tea, DeGeneres is set to sit down with friend and fellow daytime talk retiree Oprah Winfrey for what will certainly be a saucy interview on May 13.
Grab your popcorn—based on recent big interviews, we know Oprah won’t hold back her punches.
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