Or, how could it miss so badly? Anybody see it? Granted, first episodes of sitcoms, where they have to set up the situation from which the comedy flows, are generally dreadful, but YEESH! And that Jewish “Seventh Heaven”/“Ed” cross with Daniel Stern? Thank God it is only a half hour show.
I saw The Ellen Show. I hope it does better, I hope it becomes better. 'Cause I think Ellen is real funny. The only problem with her old show is that when she came out, she ran gay jokes into the ground, that’s what the script was about, basically. And while I think it’s cool she have some gay referernces in this show, I hope the scripts don’t turn into one big “Hey! Look! I’m gay!” like “Ellen” did. We know you’re gay Ellen. Let’s have some new plots.
Part of good comedy is sometimes letting the audience fill in the blanks. Part of the reason the original Ellen show (pre-coming out) was entertaining was because of the whole androgeny vibe she gave off which was kind of neat and the comedy was tuned to her standup rhythms.
Post-coming out the show took on a more polemical tone and was not as amusing as before and it failed. The sad part of this scenario is that Ellen DeGeneres blamed the network for not promoting her strongly enough instead of recognizing the fact that network comedy shows have to be appealing to mass audiences to keep going and refused to acknowledge that the change in tone is what did the show in.
IIRC the point I remember the show “jumping the shark” was when Ellen was dating some successful professional woman with a young daughter conceived by sperm being injected with a turkey baster and the daughter was expounding on the fact that it was no big deal not to have a dad and be conceived via a turkey baster as long as mom loved her and mom’s lover made her happy etc etc. Regardless of whether this POV rings your bell or not you could almost hear the channel being changed at that point.
I only saw a couple of the post-coming out episodes of “Ellen,” so I can’t make much of a comment about how consistently funny it was. The few episodes I saw were amusing enough. Something to remember in critiquing “Ellen” is that it was the first American sitcom with a lesbian title character. No one had ever written one before and no one knew really how to do it. One person’s “polemic” is another person’s desperately sought-after affirmation.
DeGeneres did initially blame ABC for a lot of the problems. I agree with her to an extent. Slapping it with a TV-M rating and putting a big old parental advisory on it seemed excessive. In a recent interview with The Advocate, DeGeneres has acknowledged that ABC probably handled her show as well as any other network would have and that she has reached out to mend fences there, but that ABC wasn’t very receptive to it.
The 9/28 episode was the second, not the first. The show had a “special premiere episode” earlier in the week or maybe last week. I missed the 1st episode, watched the 2nd. I was amused by it, at about the same level as her first show. Some of the plot twists were painfully obvious (who didn’t know the moment we saw him that the guy at the stream was the former guidance counselor?) but there were some funny moments. I’ll probably keep watching it as long as I remember it’s on and there’s not something more interesting that airs opposite it. In its own way, though, it’s as revolutionary as the first. A lesbian actress playing a lesbian guidance counselor with the radical right trumpeting about “recruitment”? Amazing.
Unfortunately, neither really succeeds as a sitcom. The new show seems to have (for its lone episode so far) avoided falling into that trap. Unfortunately, the whole premise of the successful businesswoman returning to her small-town roots played out rather predictably. But, as that was just setting everything up, I’m not going to judge the show by that, but rather by how they implemented the idea. On that count, it seems like it’ll pan out rather well. Not something I’m going to plan my life around, but I’ll catch it if I’m around at the time.
Not every week, but perhaps for the occassional Very Special Episode…