Ellen DeGeneres’ Unfunny Netflix Special Leaves So Much Unsaid

Few celebrities have quite as much experience with crisis PR as Ellen DeGeneres. As anyone who was sentient in 1997 will recall, she confirmed years’ worth of rumors about her sexual orientation on the cover of a certain magazine: “Yep, I’m Gay.” It was a transitional moment for LGBTQ people in mainstream American culture, and DeGeneres’ coming out still, unfortunately, qualified as a controversy. The backlash killed her ABC sitcom, Ellen. But after a few rough years, she returned to the more queer-friendly media landscape for which her coming out helped pave the way, with an upbeat daytime chat show. The Ellen DeGeneres Show made her one of pop culture’s most beloved figures—until, in 2020, reports surfaced that she presided over a “toxic workplace.” In the spring of 2022, the series wrapped and DeGeneres once again vanished from our TVs.

Now she’s doing what every extremely famous stand-up these days does to address an elephant in the room: a Netflix special. Yet Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval, now available to stream, is not, according to the 66-year-old comedian, a comeback show; it’s a farewell. In a Facebook post announcing the project, she wrote: “To answer the questions everyone is asking me—Yes, I’m going to talk about it. Yes this is my last special. Yes, Portia really is that pretty in real life.” Well, to answer the questions everyone must still have about For Your Approval: Yes, she talks about it—though not in an especially revelatory or introspective or satisfying way. No, the special is not particularly funny, either. Yes, Portia comes on stage for the valedictory curtain call, glamorous as ever.

DeGeneres made her name as a stand-up in the mid-’80s, doing the kind of lighthearted, apolitical comedy that fueled the rise of such peers as Jerry Seinfeld and Ray Romano. The aw-shucks, everywoman charm that made her an endearing talk-show host was on display from the beginning. Four decades later, she seems most comfortable in this same observational mode—though, also like Seinfeld, her wealth and fame palpably strain her ability to find relatable topics. The new special features extended riffs on the frustrations of cars (“Don’t get me started on dashboard lights”) and her well-known fascination with animals (“Everything in nature is living up to its full potential, but I am so disappointed in pigeons”). She spends quite a bit of time pondering the correct pronunciation of the adjective legged: one syllable or two? Personal anecdotes include conspicuous name-drops. How humiliating to arrive early to a party at Usher’s and find oneself helping the staff set up! How very Ellen to miss dinner with Mick Jagger because she’s already changed into sweatpants for the night! I never laughed out loud, but a line about why she relates to chickens elicited a smile: “They lay an egg every day. And as someone who once hosted a daily talk show, I can really appreciate that.”

In fairness, I don’t think most people who tune in will do so for the jokes. Viewers want to hear Ellen talk about it. This is the transaction implicit in all specials of this nature: while the star gets a fat paycheck and a chance to state their case directly to the public, subscribers get the contrition, or just the parasocial intimacy, we crave. And, of course, Netflix gets content guaranteed to attract attention. Chris Rock talked about it, telling us how he really feels about Will and Jada Pinkett Smith in a special that addressed the infamous Oscars slap—one that shares a director, Joel Gallen, with For Your Approval. Aziz Ansari talked about it in his relatively introspective first special after an essay went viral detailing a date in which his sexual advances made the author uncomfortable.

There is often a sorry-not-sorry undertone to performances of the latter variety; like DeGeneres, though a tier less famous, Ansari was accused of bad behavior that fell short of the horrors for which #MeToo had (at least temporarily) obliterated the careers of some powerful men. His special balanced expressions of concern for the woman he evidently hurt and promises that he was working on himself with the argument that we’re all bigger dirtbags that we’d like to think. Ellen’s return to the stage, filmed at Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre in August, is even less vulnerable and more self-serving. Fans hoping for accountability or contrition are likely to be disappointed.

DeGeneres spends much of the special speaking, both explicitly and obliquely, about her crisis. She summarizes the incident so simplistically, she might as well be speaking to children: suddenly, everyone started calling her, a woman whose daily signoff was “be kind to each other,” mean. “I got kicked out of show business,” she says. “Because I’m mean. Yeah, you can’t be mean and be in show business.” Point taken—but if you’re not kind, you probably shouldn’t build your entire career on the impression that you are. Also, did DeGeneres really get kicked out of show business? Her talk show survived for almost two years after BuzzFeed published the first of two exposés on The Ellen DeGeneres Show’s workplace culture. Jennifer Aniston, Billie Eilish, and Pink were unfazed enough by the controversy surrounding the host to fête her on the series finale. And two years after all that, she’s back on our screens with a much-anticipated special filmed in front of a live audience so effusively supportive, you’d think she’d given them all cars of their own to complain about.

So, what does DeGeneres have to say for herself? First of all, she wants us to know that the show’s staff were like family and that 16 of them who’d previously identified as straight came out as queer over the course of 19 seasons. (What are we supposed to do with that information?) Throughout For Your Approval, she offers excuses for what she never quite admits might’ve been chaos on her set, along with several disclosures that seem intended to evoke sympathy. Ellen has OCD and ADD, she tells us, along with the need to “heal childhood wounds” by earning the love of strangers. Also: “I was a very immature boss. Because I didn’t want to be a boss.” (Who was forcing her?) In her strangest yet, somehow, most direct response to the accusations, she explains that she enjoyed pranking not just guests, but also anxious underlings with, for instance, a button in her office that could trigger faux snakes to drop from the ceiling. “Scaring was just a big component of the show.”

Not that she’s taking much responsibility for what allegedly happened on her watch. For DeGeneres, the whole debacle is really about learning not to care what people think; she used to get Botox and fillers, for instance, and now she’s au naturale. This is the first hint that she is, God help us, spinning her non-cancellation as a feminist issue. Soon, she’s lamenting that men are allowed to be mean bosses, but women aren’t. (A world where bosses of all genders get to act like dictators is probably not what Simone de Beauvoir had in mind.) “We have all these unwritten rules, based on gender, of acceptable behavior,” she says. Gender-atypical behavior makes people uncomfortable, and “when people get uncomfortable, there are consequences.” For Your Approval climaxes with DeGeneres reflecting that she’s “happy not being a boss or a brand or a billboard—just a multifaceted person,” then proclaiming “I’m a strong woman” to thunderous applause. By the end of the sermon—this part of the special is not even trying to be comedy—I was powerless to stop myself from mentally inserting Katy Perry’s “Roar” as a soundtrack.

All of this would be irritating to listen to but relatively benign if the reports from The Ellen DeGeneres Show set hadn’t been so alarming. The comedian never repeats the specific accusations about what happened behind the scenes; even those who followed the story at the time may have, by now, forgotten the details, which surely helps her create the impression that some jerks randomly decided to destroy her life by calling her mean. In fact, dozens of the talk show’s former and then-current staffers described, in the BuzzFeed articles, a hostile workplace environment defined by “racism, fear, and intimidation” as well as incidents of “harassment, sexual misconduct, and assault from top producers.” In 2020, the New York Times reported that, amid “staffing changes” made in the wake of those pieces, DeGeneres apologized to employees in an email acknowledging their unhappiness, claiming to have “deep compassion for those being looked at differently, or treated unfairly, not equal, or—worse—disregarded,” and vowing to do better. The following May, she announced that she was ending the show but said that decision had been made years earlier.

I don’t think anyone expected DeGeneres to go item-by-item through the exposés in a comedy special, but if comedy specials are the new confessional magazine covers or Barbara Walters interviews—if she was really so ready to talk about it—then the self-flattering revisionism of For Your Approval is a cop out. Not once does the comedian explain what she means when she says she “got kicked out of show business.” Not once does she spare a thought for the more junior, lower-paid, less-powerful people she admitted, four years ago, that she’d failed. Not once does she admit to anything more than the silly mistakes of an unqualified boss who is nonetheless a strong woman. Not once does she give the impression that she’s contemplated the unrest at The Ellen DeGeneres Show as anything more than something bad that happened to Ellen DeGeneres. I mean, I have no idea whether Aziz Ansari genuinely felt bad about his accuser’s experience on their date, but at least he had the self-awareness to realize he was expected to perform remorse.

If DeGeneres is right about one thing, it’s that many bad bosses—most of them male, many of them in the entertainment industry—face zero scrutiny for their misdeeds and escape with their legacies intact. No one should be equating the button in her office with the one in Matt Lauer’s, either. The problem with For Your Approval, aside from the fact that it is almost never funny, is that it feels so disingenuous, so calculated to rehabilitate an image and preserve that triumph for posterity. It’s less a comedy special, the best of which arrive at humor through honest insights, than a stump speech. 

The good news, for DeGeneres, is that opinions like this one are no longer of concern to her. “Caring what people think, to a degree, is healthy. But not if it affects your mental health,” she says, finally. “So, after a lifetime of caring, I just can’t anymore. So I don’t.” If only she had arrived at that conclusion before writing and performing a 70-minute infomercial to restore her reputation.