The History of "Ellen"...

[Adamantium]

from a fan. Keep in mind, I don't know that much more than anyone here, and I don't know any behind the scenes stories. This is just the facts that I do know, presented in a nice story.

The History of "Ellen"
In the early nineties, Seinfeld was a very popular show for NBC. ABC decided to have a gender-reversed Seinfeld and star stand-up comic Ellen DeGeneres. Maggie Wheeler, Holly Fulger and Arye Gross were cast as Ellen’s friends. The series was titled These Friends of Mine. Thirteen episodes were ordered for the 1994 midseason run.

Ellen DeGeneres played Ellen Morgan, an insecure, thirty something employee at a little bookstore, Buy the Book. Her roommate (since college) was Adam Green; Anita was Ellen’s sex-crazed neighbor, in the apartment building; and Holly was Ellen’s friend since high school. Together, the four friends spent most of their time together, usually hanging out in Ellen and Adam’s apartment.

After seven episodes were produced (although none yet aired), Maggie Wheeler (Anita) left the series. The following season, she would gain fame playing the recurring character, Janice on Friends. In fact, the eighth episode brought upon some changes to These Friends of Mine. Buy the Book, where Ellen was a manager was now a regular setting (second only to Ellen’s apartment). David Anthony Higgins became a regular in the role of ‘Coffee Joe’ Farrell. A sarcastic man whose passion was to make and serve coffee.

Once all thirteen episodes were shot, they began to air, starting with Wednesday March 30, 1994. However, ABC chose to air the episodes out of order. They even held back two episodes, “The Mugging” and “The Tape.” So only eleven episodes actually aired. The show proved successful (although not nearly as popular as it’s inspiration, Seinfeld). ABC renewed the series for a second season.

Changes were set for the second season of These Friends of Mine. First thing was renaming the show. It was changed to Ellen. Holly Fulger was out, with no explanation. ‘Coffee Joe’ was now a cast member. Ellen cut her hair short and Adam shaved his beard. Joely Fisher was added to the cast as Ellen’s best friend since camp. Paige Clark (Fisher) was much like Anita. She loved to date around and always offered advice to Ellen. Ellen became the owner of Buy the Book so the recurring boss from season one was no longer on the show. Adam became a struggling photographer and Paige was a movie producer’s assistant.

The changes seemed to be a good move. Ellen was thirteenth in the ratings. Twenty-four episodes were produced in the second season. Half-way through the season, Clea Lewis became a recurring character. She played the annoying Audrey Penney. Audrey believed she was Ellen’s best friend and had a crush on Adam. She proved to be a positive move for the show and was added to the cast full time for the upcoming - third - season. However, Arye Gross's days on the show were numbered. He was being let go from the show. But instead of Adam disappearing without explanation like Holly and Anita from season one, he would stay on for a few more episodes and have a farewell episode.

In the fall of 1995, season three of Ellen debuted on ABC. Jeremy Piven joined the cast as Spence Kovac, Ellen's cousin and new roommate, who was kicked out of his residency as a doctor for punching a patient. The character of Adam appeared, usually in one scene per show for the first four episodes, before getting his big send-off. Adam got a photography job in London. Also, an earthquake forced Ellen to remodel Buy the Book and somehow hire Audrey, which annoyed everyone, especially Joe. While many fans consider the third to be the best season of Ellen, the ratings were not as high as the second season. That's not to say they weren't good. Ellen was still a hit for ABC. So much so, that Ellen decided it might be time to make a personal revelation to the world.

The fourth season began in the fall of 1996. There had been no changes to the cast. However, Ellen started leaving clues to her sexuality. America was pretty sure that Ellen DeGeneres was indeed a lesbian. But it wasn't until the April 30th episode, titled "The Puppy Episode" that both Ellen Morgan and Ellen DeGeneres came out of the closet. This hour-long episode brought in some of the highest ratings ever for the show. Everything looked great for Ellen.

One thing Ellen didn't like were the warnings put before each episode. However, ABC was taking a big chance in airing this show. It had become groundbreaking. When season five debuted in the fall of 1997, things were different. The high ratings were gone. Changes in the show included Ellen moving from her apartment to a house, Ellen leaving Buy the Book, Joe leaving Buy the Book and opening up 'Hot Cup of Joe." Audrey, Spence, Joe and Paige went from being in every episode to now being occasional players in the show.

The big change in season five was the addition of guest star Lisa Darr playing Laurie Manning, Ellen's girlfriend. The fifth season got low ratings and after an hour-long, fake Hollywood tribute, the show was cancelled. Ellen was devastated and even blamed ABC for the cancellation, not the low ratings.

In the fall of 1998, Ellen came to reruns on Lifetime. The show has been on and off in reruns since then. Currently it runs on Oxygen. Seasons one thru three are out on DVD and four and five are coming by the end of this year.

[Dr. Thong]

I didn't watch Ellen, though I found your post informative and interesting.

It was my understanding, however, that the reason Ellen's ratings nosedived was because many or most of the episodes had a gay theme to them. Supposedly, viewers felt the gay/lesbian thing was being forced on them as opposed to it being a show that just happened to have a lesbian character.

Like I said, I didn't watch it, so I can't authoritatively comment on it, but it's interesting that in the TV season following Ellen's demise, Will & Grace debuted...and lasted for eight years.

[Adamantium]

Originally Posted by Dr. Thong

It was my understanding, however, that the reason Ellen's ratings nosedived was because many or most of the episodes had a gay theme to them. Supposedly, viewers felt the gay/lesbian thing was being forced on them as opposed to it being a show that just happened to have a lesbian character.

Like I said, I didn't watch it, so I can't authoritatively comment on it, but it's interesting that the in the TV season following Ellen's demise, Will & Grace debuted...and lasted for eight years.

I think that's exactly why it was cancelled. Or it could have been that the character was one way for the first 83 episodes and then all of a sudden she's gay. I still liked the show in it's last season, but it certainly wasn't "Ellen" at it's best.

[TMC]

Ellen DeGeneres on "These Friends of Mine," the original title of her TV series: "It was bad."

Ellen DeGeneres on her show's initial opening title sequence, in which she and those friends of hers cavorted in the desert and did leg-kicks: "Everyone hated that. . . . (Shooting) it was a hellacious time. . . . I don't know where that came from, I have no idea."

Ellen DeGeneres on two mystery episodes that will not run: "They were just bad. Bad ideas, bad. . . . ABC paid a lot of money for them, but I begged them not to run them."

Ellen DeGeneres on some of the episodes that did run: "It's like having a photo of you that you hate and the whole world is out there looking at it going, 'God, that's hideous.' And you think, 'I know it is; so why are you looking at it?' "

Hard to believe she's talking about a hit show, isn't it?

DeGeneres' show was an instant ratings smash as a replacement series this spring, and it enters its sophomore season--retitled "Ellen" at the behest of the network--in a plum position, following "Roseanne" on Wednesday nights.

Moreover, DeGeneres, whose first act as a stand-up comic 14 years back consisted mainly of munching on a Whopper, has now become, more or less, the symbol of a network: ABC has announced that she will be the network's spokeswoman in radio ads and on-air promos, personally introducing the debut of every show in ABC's lineup this fall--an almost unprecedented vote of confidence. She's also co-hosting the Emmy Awards telecast on ABC Sept. 11.

Yet ABC held the series back more than a year after the first episodes were taped. And in its earlier incarnation, "These Friends of Mine" was a textbook case of how even the engine that powers the machine has no control over the steering wheel. Staff defections, critical jabs, a brief production shutdown to regain creative focus, and DeGeneres' own dissatisfaction with some of the writing made the program's success less sweet than it should have been.

*

"As in any business, there are creative, talented people and then there are people who could have been working at IBM, but they're working at a studio instead, and people who have no idea what the creative side is, they just look at the business side," DeGeneres observes. "That's frustrating."

Even though significant moves were taken during the show's hiatus to ensure that everyone concerned was on the same page artistically, the recent departure of executive producer Wendy Goldman after only 10 weeks on the job suggests there may be a few more kinks to be ironed out.

DeGeneres, who mirrors her TV character, Ellen Morgan, in her look-on-the-bright-side demeanor and eager-to-please friendliness, casts the negatives in an upbeat light. "Even if it's bad, and it hurts, at least you're now somebody to talk about," she says.

"As far as the creative struggle now, ABC has really just taken control of the ship and said where it's going. They said: 'It's going to be called "Ellen," and it's going to be more about Ellen.' It wasn't even me standing up and saying things should change."

Disney, the show's production house, "didn't want to call the show 'Ellen,' " DeGeneres says. "They had a rule: They didn't want to call a show by the star's name. We asked many, many times. 'Couch People' was one of the suggested names for the show, and we were, 'Omigod! Why would anyone want to watch a show called "Couch People"?' "

When DeGeneres signed on for the series, she says, executive producers Neil Marlens and Carol Black "really had all the clout," but following internal disagreements regarding the direction of the program, they left after a handful of episodes. Many critics dismissed the show as "Seinfeld Lite," and more, who were fans of DeGeneres, responded as your parents might--they weren't mad, just disappointed.

Without an executive producer who truly understood and appreciated DeGeneres' own distinctive comic sensibilities, as Larry David does with Jerry Seinfeld, her perspective was submerged, and the show was less sophisticated and more risque than her stand-up persona (the pilot tried to eke laughs out of a character who barked like a dog during sex).

"What ultimately people were saying was, 'How come the show is not what you do?' " DeGeneres concedes. "That's because I didn't have a Larry David. . . . If someone's trying to create a show for you, unless they've been your writing partner for the whole 14 years, they can try and they can come really close, but that's why no one's written for me in the past 14 years, because I write the best for myself. They tried, they gave it a good shot, and these producers are trying, they're getting closer, and they're seeing more what they can do. And eventually they're going to hit the bull's-eye."

Part of the problem, perhaps, was that DeGeneres was so happy just having her own show that she was too willing to please others and didn't assert her own vision--in other words, a rare case of a star not having enough ego. "I felt I was the lucky one," she says. "They were giving me this wonderful break. I've learned that I have a large part to do with the show and I should speak up and say, 'This is not what I would want to do.' "

David Rosenthal, who wrote for "Laurie Hill," an earlier series on which DeGeneres co-starred, and a co-creator and executive producer of "Ellen," adds: "Unfortunately, we didn't have the benefit of being on the air when shooting those first shows. There was more than a year between taping the shows and their airing. That's a lot of time to go without audience feedback. The criticism came in a vacuum. There was no public response."

When "Ellen" returns Sept. 21, last season's clunky title and the cloying title sequence will be gone, as will actress Holly Fulger. (Another actress, Maggie Wheeler, left after the first six episodes.) Joely Fisher joins the cast as Paige, Ellen's childhood chum.

"Holly is a wonderful actress, but ultimately the problem was she projected a real vulnerability, which is what Ellen does as well, and they stepped on each other," Rosenthal explains. "Paige has more of an edge, a tougher, bolder side. She's more act-now-think-later."

Adam (Arye Gross), Ellen's platonic roommate, will return, but sans goatee and his more weaselly impulses. Adam didn't test all that well with audiences, Rosenthal explains, "so we cleaned him up, made him a little sweeter."

Mainly, though, "Ellen" will focus on Ellen, particularly her talent for talking her way into and out of uncomfortable situations. "My feeling is, Ellen is the funniest person in the room--it would be foolish not to listen to her," Rosenthal says.

In Studio 3 on the Disney lot in Burbank, DeGeneres is rehearsing a scene in which Ellen Morgan visits her dentist, a handsome gent she just happens to have a crush on. DeGeneres, wearing a "Late Show With David Letterman" T-shirt and sweat pants, lets loose with her beaming, appealingly childlike smile as she begins playing with the dentist's chair. She hits a button once, it whirs and elevates her; hits it again, it whirs her back down. She hits the buttons so that the chair undulates up and down as quickly as it can, but still at a soporific pace, and, ad-libbing, throws an arm upward, like a suburban cowgirl atop the kind of dull, listless mechanical bull that lawyers would have designed in order to avoid lawsuits.

In general, DeGeneres' bumpy ride through the world of network television has gotten smoother. The episode's centerpiece is a sequence in which Ellen, under the influence of nitrous oxide, flirts shamelessly and humiliatingly with her dentist. "If I had a scene like this in every show, I'd be ecstatic," DeGeneres says. "It's, 'You're attracted to this guy, you're on nitrous: Go.' "

Of course, none of this might have happened had DeGeneres not become so disillusioned with stand-up. After laboring long years to create a unique comic persona that, she says, revealed and distorted "all sides of me to form a sneeze guard to protect me from the public," she got burned out about five years ago, weary of having to compete with slick yet lame wanna-bes and opportunists who stole her material.

"When I first started on the road and somebody on the plane would ask me what I did and I'd say, 'I'm a comedian,' they'd look at me like I was a gunslinger. That was weird. Then it got to the point where saying 'I'm a comedian' was like saying, 'I'm an attorney'. . . . It got to the point where I hated saying I was a comedian."

Cable TV helped destroy the integrity of stand-up, she says. "Everybody suddenly realized: 'We can have a half-hour program, and you don't have to pay actors huge sums of money. You have a set that's a brick wall. And put up five people, pay 'em scale and you own 'em forever. You get different guys every week, and you have a show.' All of a sudden, you started running out of good comedians and anybody got on television."

On her farewell tour, however, she regained a smidgen of appreciation for what she had done all those years.

"After a show, I usually just kind of say thank you and leave, but in New York, I just kind of watched everybody stand up and listened to the applause for the first time in a long time, because you get so used to that," she recalls. "And it really kind of--I let it in. It was weird. I was thinking, 'This is a really nice thing that not too many people get to experience,' and here I was taking it for granted for so long."

Though her series is only entering its second season, DeGeneres is already looking forward to a time when she'll no longer do TV. Call it the David Caruso syndrome.

"I don't want to be 50 years old going 'Aaaaaugh!' You see those people on the talk shows and they have the one catch phrase and they do it and the audience goes crazy," she says, the distaste of the idea apparent on her face.

"It's so uncomfortable. You watch 'I Love Lucy,' which is wonderful, then you see 'The Lucy Show,' and you're just cringing. Somebody should've stopped her. Somebody should've said, 'Don't do TV anymore.' "

'ELLEN' OBJECTS TO PERCEPTION THAT SHE'S WIELDING AN AX

Jan 15, 1996

Few shows have changed more in the past couple of years than ABC's "Ellen."

All of the cast, with the exception of star Ellen DeGeneres, has changed. The sets have changed. The producers and writers have changed. Even the name of the show has changed - it started out as "These Friends of Mine."And all of that turmoil has led to widespread reports that DeGeneres herself has been more or less lopping off the heads of the people she works with - a charge she vigorously denied when talking to TV critics here.

"I never fired anybody," DeGeneres said. "That's absolutely false. Whenever I see stuff like that or read stuff like that, it's upsetting. People are going to assume what they want to assume."

Since it debuted as a midseason replacement show in the spring of 1994, "Ellen" has been trying to find itself. Repeatedly. And there were lots of people trying to help it look.

"Between the studio and the network everybody said, 'Let's try to make some changes in the characters and the show. But it was nothing to do with anybody being unhappy or being fired," DeGeneres said.

The most recent departure came when Arye Gross - the last remaining member of the original supporting cast - left "Ellen" earlier this season. And while it was reported that he was unhappy about being dropped from the show, DeGeneres denied that was true.

"He wasn't really happy with where his character was going," she said. "I don't think anybody really knew what to do with (his) Adam character. It had changed so much from the different changes the show has gone through.

"And it was mutual agreement that he wanted to go off, and we were fine with understanding that. It wasn't like there was anybody mad at anybody."

But it has been more than just the on-camera cast that has changed, a fact that DeGeneres herself joked about.

"We have had 43 producers," she said. "They keep spontaneously combusting."

Actually, the show is on its third set of executive producers - and that's not counting the revolving door that has seen other producers and writers come and go. But DeGeneres not only denied responsibility for all the changes, she said she actually didn't know about some of them until they had occurred.

"I do find out about things after the fact," she said. "I think because sometimes I don't exert this power that everyone believes that I have. Sometimes I really just want to have a life. I want to go home and I don't want it to be a 24-hour-a-day job. I want to just do my work and the best I can.

"So sometimes things do get done. And all of a sudden, I go, 'Wait a minute, what's going on here?' So that does happen."

In a day when female sitcom stars from Roseanne to Brett Butler to Cybill Shepherd seemingly delight in their images as iron-fisted powers behind the scenes, DeGeneres seems genuinely unhappy that she has become the latest alleged power wielder.

"I think sometimes people don't want to believe that things are actually fine on the set," DeGeneres said. "It's boring to read that things are fine and nice and I'm a nice person. I think people want to believe that because people are leaving it has to be because I fired them. And I have no idea where it comes from."

And she said that while she had experience as a stand-up comedian as well as in supporting roles on other sitcoms, she didn't didn't know what she was getting into when she signed on to headline her own show.

"You suddenly get a TV show and you suddenly become this person that is watched and studied," DeGeneres said. "And it's a very interesting place to be. You go through different phases of what it means and how important it is to you. But, ultimately, I try to just really look at the importance and what my priorities are in life."

And, mind you, she's not complaining about being a TV star.

"It's a wonderful job," DeGeneres said. "I am very fortunate. I love what I do.

"As far as putting the kind of pressure on that I am an industry or a product, I don't even want to think about that because I'm a person and that's all I can handle."

So why is Arye Gross no longer Ellen DeGeneres’s buddy on her hit ABC sitcom Ellen? It depends on whom you ask. I hear he got fired after objecting to DeGeneres—who is not the show’s director—giving him stage directions. A rep for the show vehemently denies that Gross was given the heave-ho, saying the actor asked before the season began to be let out of his contract to pursue a film career. All Gross will say is that while “I was not initially pleased, I’m happy to have put all that behind me.” He will next be seen with Nick Nolte in the movie Mother Night, due out in the fall of 1996….

MITCHELL FINK December 04, 1995 12:00 PM

[RetroGuy2000]

I actually preferred the original show to the later seasons, after the original cast had all been axed.

[Chocolate Moose]

I liked all the cast changes.