Ellen DeGeneres Is Making a Comeback. Has Hollywood Held Her Accountable?

It’s been almost exactly one year since Ellen DeGeneres’ “toxic workplace” troubles first began—but you wouldn’t know it from her Jimmy Kimmel Live! appearance this week.

On Tuesday, the daytime star and her host played games and chatted about DeGeneres’ reticence toward pot, and her wife Portia de Rossi’s recent appendix surgery. The appearance also gave DeGeneres a chance to plug two projects, both debuting this week: HBO Max competition series Ellen’s Next Great Designer and the Discovery+ documentary film Endangered.

Kimmel did not ask DeGeneres about her former employees’ claims that they faced racism and intimidation while working on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Instead, the two played a game in which they tried to remember bits they’d each performed during their careers. (Clips were also involved—including one in which DeGeneres and guest Heidi Klum chucked meatballs into the audience for some forgotten reason.)

Audiences have clearly soured on DeGeneres’ brand as Hollywood’s “kindest” star; just look at her ratings, which have plummeted far more than any of her competitors. At the same time, she’s largely avoided addressing the controversy surrounding her daytime program outside of an apology memo to staff and a stilted on-air mea culpa, in which she avoided addressing any specific allegations in detail. As DeGeneres returns to business as usual, it seems unlikely that her A-list peers—many of whom rose to defend her when the allegations first broke—will make much of an effort to hold her to account.

Perhaps the cracks in DeGeneres’ brand had already begun to show in December of 2019, when she accused Dakota Johnson of not inviting her to her birthday party only to be met with a reply that went instantly viral: “Actually, no. That’s not the truth, Ellen...”

But the real trouble began last April, when Variety reported that crew members on The Ellen DeGeneres Show were furious over top-level producers’ poor communication regarding their working hours and pay in the early stages of the pandemic, and the show’s decision to hire a non-union company to help DeGeneres film her show from home. (A spokesperson for Warner Bros. Television told Variety that crew members had been consistently paid during the pandemic, albeit at reduced hours, and “acknowledged that communication could have been better, but cited complications due to the chaos caused by COVID-19.”)

It didn’t help that weeks earlier, a viral Twitter thread had amassed several unverified accounts that seemed to corroborate the long-gestating rumor that daytime’s “kindest” star was anything but. Among the allegations was the claim that staff on DeGeneres’ show were instructed not to talk to her, that she tried to get a waitress fired over a chipped nail, and that behind closed doors she’d expressed disdain for her audience; previously, Ellen writer Karen Kilgariff had discussed how DeGeneres fired her when she refused to to cross a picket line during the 2008 writers’ strike, and has not spoken to her since.

People Are Finally Seeing the Real Ellen and It Isn’t PrettyTHE MASK

Cassie da Costa, Marlow Stern

That claim resurfaced months later, when former employees of The Ellen DeGeneres Show described the show’s alleged behind-the-scenes environment of racism and intimidation to BuzzFeed. A Black former employee claimed that a senior-level producer once joked about getting her confused with a colleague who also wore her hair in box braids. (At a party, she added, one of the show’s main writers told her, “I’m sorry, I only know the names of the white people who work here.”) Another employee described returning to work following one month off after checking into a mental health facility after a suicide attempt, only to find out that their position was being eliminated.

Most of BuzzFeed’s sources blamed producers and managers for the toxic work environment. But another former staffer argued, “If [DeGeneres] wants to have her own show and have her name on the show title, she needs to be more involved to see what’s going on.”

“I think the executive producers surround her and tell her, ‘Things are going great, everybody’s happy,’ and she just believes that,” they added. “But it’s her responsibility to go beyond that.”

In a follow-up article published in late July, former employees alleged that top-level producers had engaged in rampant harassment and sexual misconduct. They also responded to an apology memo DeGeneres sent to the show’s staff, in which she wrote, “As we’ve grown exponentially, I’ve not been able to stay on top of everything and relied on others to do their jobs as they knew I’d want them done. Clearly some didn’t. That will now change and I’m committed to ensuring this does not happen again.”

One former employee told BuzzFeed, “For someone who’s so involved in the show and the creative aspect, and having been in those meetings with her, it’s very hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that she doesn’t hear the same whispers... Unless she really is just in this bubble.”

“She knows,” another source said. “She knows shit goes on, but also she doesn’t want to hear it.”

After an internal investigation, Warner Bros. dismissed producers Ed Glavin, Kevin Leman, and Jonathan Norman in August.

“We have identified several staffing changes, along with appropriate measures to address the issues that have been raised, and are taking the first steps to implement them,” a representative for Warner Bros. told Variety. “Warner Bros. and Ellen DeGeneres are all committed to ensuring a workplace based on respect and inclusion. We are confident this course of action will lead us to the right way forward for the show.”

DeGeneres did offer a public apology when her show returned to air in September, but the address kept things strikingly vague.

“As you may have heard, this summer there were allegations of a toxic work environment at our show and then there was an investigation. I learned that things happened here that never should have happened,” DeGeneres told her audience. “I take that very seriously, and I want to say I am so sorry to the people who were affected. I know that I’m in a position of privilege and power, and I realized that with that comes responsibility, and I take responsibility for what happens at my show.”

“Being known as the ‘be kind’ lady is a tricky position to be in,” DeGeneres added. “So let me give you some advice out there if anybody’s thinking of changing their title or giving yourself a nickname, do not go with the ‘be kind’ lady. Don’t do it.”

As my colleague Kevin Fallon noted at the time, the celebrity apology cycle is something of a paradox, and it’s hard to imagine any statement DeGeneres could have made that would have satisfied everyone. That said, the one she gave willfully avoided engaging with the actual, material allegations at hand—so it’s hard to gauge how involved DeGeneres herself has been in making sure her program cleans up its act.

That, more than anything, is what makes DeGeneres’ unchallenged return to the spotlight so frustrating. This isn’t about “canceling” Ellen. (“Cancel culture” is not a real thing.) It’s about acknowledging the genuinely troubling complaints of a significant number of former employees—all of whom worked on a show that bore her name—and asking her to answer for them.

The love DeGeneres has fostered among fans over the years has been hard-won; whatever one might think of her now, the decision she made in the late 1990s to come out publicly when doing so could, and in fact almost did, cost her career should not be diminished. But in recent years, DeGeneres has also, on more than one occasion, chosen to align herself with power over compassion. Among the celebrities who rose to her defense last year was Kevin Hart, whose reputation DeGeneres helped launder after his old homophobic tweets resurfaced. And let’s not forget the moment in 2019 when DeGeneres and George W. Bush—who opposed gay marriage, and left thousands of New Orleans residents without adequate food or water in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to say nothing of the Iraq War— laughed it up at a football game together.

Both instances seemed to reinforce the idea that DeGeneres’ kindness is reserved for certain kinds of people—namely, those who are elite and powerful like herself. Watching her return to air now, relatively unscathed despite having never addressed the allegations or its victims in earnest, reinforces the idea that in the entertainment industry, the powerful are the only ones whose experiences matter.

DeGeneres’ output seems unlikely to slow down anytime soon. Ellen’s Next Great Designer was one of four series announced in a 2019 pact between DeGeneres and HBO Max. The furniture design series, similar to her old HGTV program Ellen’s Design Challenge, received a straight-to-series order—along with dating show First Dates Hotel and the animated children’s series Little Ellen. The fourth project, docuseries Finding Einstein, was in development at the time of the announcement.

Discovery+ also appears to be in the DeGeneres business for the long haul; the platform announced a multi-year deal with her this March. Endangered—which DeGeneres narrated and executive produced—is the first in a slate of natural history-focused specials, series and documentaries that she will develop with Discovery.

It seems inevitable that DeGeneres will wind up promoting these ventures in some fashion as they premiere. Hopefully someone will find the time to ask her about one of the biggest entertainment news stories of 2020 as she does.