A couple of folks have written to ask for my "take" on what's going on with Ellen DeGeneres and her afternoon talk show. With all the important, life-threatening things going on in the world right now, I kind of envy being able to think at all about a topic like that.
I have absolutely no inside info on that operation. I watched her show a few times — usually to see a specific guest — and I liked what I saw but felt that there wasn't enough of it between commercials. Then I watched a few times not to see a certain guest…just to watch. Those times, it seemed to me that an awful lot of the time they did have was spent with non-celeb guests and members of the audience talking about how Ellen is the most incredible, super-terrific, awesome, fabulous human being who has ever walked this planet.
I'm not saying she's not a great talent and host but if you're not name-checked in the Holy Bible, you cannot possibly be as godlike as some Ellen fans make her out to be on her show — and it is her show. She could tone that down if she wanted to. It felt to me like Donald Trump demanding that all meetings start by everyone around the table taking turns saying what an honor it was to be in the same room with him and to serve him.
It makes you think there's some ego problem there somewhere. Maybe that's not fair but it sure gives credibility to allegations of tyranny, arrogance, being mad with power…the kind of thing of which Ellen is now being accused.
She has plenty of defenders in the media but most of them are celebrities, which makes them kind of worthless as character witnesses. No one is accusing her of mistreating celebrities. In show business — in probably any business, actually — the test of The Boss's character is not how he or she interacts with important people but how they treat the ones who can't fight back; who need the job so when they're treated like crap, they have to apologize for things they didn't do and keep kissing the butts of the rich 'n' powerful.
Is Ellen guilty as charged? I dunno. I do know that if she is and this had happened twenty years ago, she would have gotten away with it as long as her show was making money. Today, there's more concern about toxic work environments, including the ones where no sexual crimes are committed. Many Big Stars of the past got away with behavior that would not be tolerated today.
I'm not 100% confident that the process by which this kind of thing is evaluated is completely fair to the accused…but then I'm also not confident that juries always decide rightly that someone is or is not guilty of First Degree Murder. You just hope they get it right most of the time. If Ellen and her show do survive, she might want to dial down the segments that are all about how just meeting her is by far the single-greatest moment of someone's life.