Selling ellen out
LABASH, MATT
Selling Ellen Out by Matt Labash Maybe you've heard. Ellen DeGeneres, the sitcom actress, and Ellen Morgan, her TV character (from the aptly titled sitcom, Ellen), are coming out, bless them. It...
...Exploitative...
...Which is to say, somebody leaked it...
...She popped up at numerous gay activist events, like an awards ceremony where she nearly sucked out k. d. lang's wisdom teeth with a kiss at the podium...
...Newsweek sources confirm this (as one might expect them to), but Time managing editor Walter Isaacson vehemently denies it as preposterous (as one might expect him to...
...Disney, of course, now owns ABC, so both are handling the emergence of Ellen the Character...
...And the show got even messier after changing its name to Ellen in the next season, going through three sets of producers, and experiencing numerous cast purges in search of a chemistry that still has not crystallized...
...This is clearly a mistake...
...The three-headed publicity monster has regularly leaked scripts (though they claimed they were guarding against such activity), rolled out selected "exclu-sives," and manufactured controversy...
...Never mind that cicadas and liver spots have come out faster than Ellen, Ellen, or Ellen...
...Howard Stern, that great cultivator of the grunt-mass palate, has a succinct formula for entertainment success: "Lesbians, Lesbians, Lesbians...
...According to Lessard, her tale hit print because Ellen the Actress told Chastity Bono the Lesbian Daughter of Sonny who told Newsweek who called Lessard who confirmed it...
...And we're still a week away from the "very special" Ellen (the show, not the character) in which the closet door is opened...
...Syndication rights had already been sold for a record $600,000 per episode to Lifetime, a cable network "for women" desperate for TV shows about women...
...one ABC source, miffed that PMK is limiting access to Ellen, says that Time locked up the "exclusive" of Ellen the Actress's outing after PMK shopped it to both Time and Newsweek before wrangling a guarantee from Time that it would make the cover...
...The bad news for Ellen is that the producers have a no-kissing rule for the time being...
...It's been great publicity for a show that was not going to make it," says Allen Banks, media director of Saatchi & Saatchi...
...And now here we are, eight months after word of the plan first appeared in TV Guide, two months after it became a definite go, and two weeks after Ellen (the actress, not the character) turned Henry Luce's weekly diary of the American Century into a lesboerotic fanzine ("Yep, I'm Gay" read Time's cover line...
...After numerous calls, even the Rev...
...Last fall, she made coy appearances on Letterman, Rosie ODonnell, and other shows where she repeated the trope that her "character finds out she's Lebanese...
...And speaking of Disney, it produces Ellen and has an army of PR people...
...Though ABC wouldn't publicly commit to going lesbian, all kinds of background sources began turning up in stories around the same time informing us that Ellen would now be appearing later in the evening because that would be a more appropriate time for an outing...
...I promise you, it ain't true," Isaacson says...
...PMK is to publicity what Disney is to amusement parks in Florida...
...Despite the feeding frenzy, Ellen was still stomped like a throw rug by The Nanny until it was moved to a new time slot in December...
...While the riskiness of such a bold programming decision has been trumpeted in nearly every feature, Ellen's dual outings posed little risk at all...
...Ellen the Actress has received nothing but adulation every step of the way...
...Thus, the good news for Ellen is that if the show offers up a string of lesbian lovelies as guest stars, it stands to garner more than a temporary ratings bump —even though DeGeneres herself resembles a slightly effeminate Van Patten brother...
...It was brilliant, and I congratulate them...
...There is so much publicity afoot, in fact, that the publicists are getting reverse publicity...
...The kiss between Amanda Donahoe and Michele Greene on L.A...
...It seems like only yesterday I was recounting to a colleague how a month had passed since the announcement that Ellen (the character, not the actress) would be revealed as a lesbian...
...ABC and Disney sounded tentative about the show's prospective direction, though the network's advance PR blurb on the new season was that Ellen would be taking a "radical new path" to "self-discovery and fulfillment...
...No matter that Ellen the Actress's emergence is news to very few, as her inclination has been an open secret for years...
...But that was last year...
...So did the Mariel Hemingway-Roseanne kiss in 1994...
...There is one publicity firm, PMK, that represents Ellen the Actress's emergence...
...We have nothing to say on the matter," said a Christian Coalition spokesman...
...Almost every major advance in this story has somehow mysteriously "leaked...
...Faced with the daunting prospect of making "Antarctica's Secrets" or "The Backlash Against HMos" the cover that week, Isaacson says it was a last-minute decision based on consensus "except for the guy who wrote the Antarctica piece...
...Indeed, Entertainment Weekly's A.J...
...Law in 1991 spiked the ratings...
...It will alienate all those potential new fans who would tune in every week and not notice that the show itself stinks...
...It was artistically weak when it debuted in March 1994 as These Friends of Mine— though it was briefly in the top 10, slotted in the downdraft of the top-rated Roseanne...
...Donald Wildmon, who made NYPD Blue a household name with a months-long protest that helped catapult the show into the top 10, wasn't available to serve up any red meat...
...True, Jerry Fal-well has called DeGeneres "Ellen Degenerate," but otherwise...
...But this flowering is in fact historic for another reason: The protracted outing has been one of the most cynical marketing ploys in the history of the medium...
...Or the duo from Men Behaving Badly...
...Jacobs says DeGeneres told him and another writer in July, two months before the TV Guide story, that her character was "going to go on a journey"—and she didn't mean to Katmandu...
...And besides, "The news is that it's a cultural milestone, and the person at the heart of it explains her thinking...
...The publicity factions have occasionally worked at cross purposes...
...All the while, ABC and the allegedly hyperconsci-entious, family-centric Disney kept the seduction going by making sure everybody knew Ellen's change in orientation might not happen...
...Where are the boycotts, the preachers, the protests...
...It is, of course, a lesser gamble to feature a lesbian lead, since many a straight male viewer can appreciate and even enthuse over the coupling of two objects of desire, without some hairy beast casting a shadow...
...So it was no big surprise to discover in September that Ellen the Character was likely going gay...
...And why is there no controversy...
...Disney was cast as bad cop on the gay beat, even though it is the same company that released Kids and Priest, conducted "Gay Day" at Disney World, and extended benefits to the same-sex partners of its employees...
...An Entertainment Weekly poll early on showed that 72 percent of the population "would not be offended if a lead character were gay...
...The pundits have already determined that DeGeneres is a "gay Jackie Robinson" (Miami Herald) achieving an "important milestone for television" while providing an "important eye-opener for mainstream America" (Denver Post) as she reaches a "personal and social landmark" (Detroit News...
...The truth that the publicity ruses obfuscate is that, sexuality aside, Ellen is a bad show—and has consistently "underperformed," as the networks say, in a strong time slot...
...And there are television precedents for the assured success of lesbian interplay...
...Not to mention ABC, the network that runs Ellen, and its PR department...
...Consequently, Ellen found itself in 39th place last season...
...Hard to tell, because there are so many authorized leakers...
...A self-conscious campaign to get attention for a middling show on a network with a prime-time schedule in critical condition...
...Matt Labash is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard...
...As Entertainment Weekly later pointed out, the "leak" coincided almost precisely with Ellen's season premiere—and even so, viewership dropped 15 percent from the season before...
...If TV really wants to be courageous, let's see Jerry and George from Seinfeld in a moment of tenderness...
...Newsweek reported that network publicist Jill Lessard "came out" on the set after "getting swept up in the moment...
...They strategically milked it for all it's worth...
...While the media have dutifully reported two or three advertisers' balking at this episode, Business Week has been alone in reporting not only that the show is a sellout, but that 30-second spots are going for 20 percent over Ellen's usual $170,000 rate...
...When Ellen finally opens the closet door next week, Matt, the gay character on Melrose Place, will have been trying for six years to get something more than his hair tousled by boyfriends...
...They" are the publicity apparatchiks who have sold not only the coming-out itself, but also the coming-out story behind the coming-out—a tale of the trepidation and bravery it took for everyone involved over a matter of many months...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 32
