60 min.
Debut: After a 35-city concert tour, an HBO special and this summer's smash hit “Finding Nemo,” Ellen DeGeneres returns to TV with her own daytime talk show.
Like Roseanne, DeGeneres has gone from stand-up comic to sitcom star to daytime diva. The show airs weekdays and features an opening monologue, celebrity interviews, musical acts and segments taped on the street with ordinary citizens. She intends to stamp the show with her own personality, choosing guests who reflect her tastes. She will also be drawing on the same sharp, sensitive observational humor that earned her kudos as the host of the anxiety-filled 2001 Emmys, which aired only weeks after Sept. 11.
But it's no coincidence that the daytime talk show really hit stride on Wednesday, when DeGeneres got a visit from one of the ghosts of A-lists past. It was an hourlong Betty White extravaganza, including memories of "Password," "Mary Tyler Moore" and the "Golden" years with Dorothy and Blanche.
"I want to do anything that to me would be fun. I just want to be as real as I can with it, that's all," DeGeneres said during a recent visit to San Francisco. "There's nothing better than playing 'Password' with Betty White."
When DeGeneres announced that she would start her own syndicated talk show, which airs at 4 p.m. daily on KNTV (Channel 11) in the Bay Area, no doubt some of her detractors had visions of political preaching and celebrity pandering. Those are, specifically, the two things that DeGeneres says she won't allow on her show.
The stand-up comic and former star of the groundbreaking sitcom "Ellen" insists that her sole mission is to have a good time, no matter who is in the other chair.
"I never stick to the subject matters, which I think is something the guest appreciates," she said. "When you see Nicole Kidman with a movie to pitch, she's on X amount of shows to promote that product. If you watch all the shows,
sort of the same things are covered. I want to try to cover different things."
That means more guests without anything to promote, whether it be 81-year- old actress White or a second-grader who is also a yo-yo champion. Along with Aniston and Timberlake, DeGeneres filled her first week with an octogenarian cake designer and a 7-year-old lemonade stand entrepreneur.
DeGeneres hopes the woman-of-the-people talk show will expand her legacy beyond the famous 1997 episode of "Ellen" in which her character came out as a lesbian. That program and DeGeneres' subsequent discussion of her own homosexuality resulted in a Time magazine cover, and is considered one of the most groundbreaking moments in television history.
But the ensuing years were not fun for DeGeneres -- the ratings for the series eventually died away and "Ellen" went off the air in 1998. The star's relationship with actress Anne Heche became tabloid fodder while her 2001 sitcom follow-up, "The Ellen Show," had a short run.
"I know everything became overshadowed by this huge event. I think it took a while to get the audience back and refocus," DeGeneres said. "I'll never be able to escape the event. It was big and it impacted a lot of people and I'm proud of it. But at the same time, it's hard. It's like, 'Can we now get back to what I do?' "
DeGeneres has done everything possible in the last two years to get back, with a successful HBO special and a stand-up comedy tour that started and ended in the Bay Area. While that was going on, writers at Pixar Studios in Emeryville penned an animated role specifically for the comic, and her voice- over as Dori the Blue Tang fish helped make "Finding Nemo" the top-grossing animated film of all time.
"People say, 'You've done sitcoms, you've done stand-up, why do a talk show?' It's like I'm being sentenced or something; it's like it's some kind of bad thing," DeGeneres said. "I think, 'What could be a better job than this?' The freedom to think on my feet, talk to whomever I want."
Since the show started Monday, DeGeneres has developed a loose routine, which is flexible depending on the guests. She addresses the audience directly,
starting each program with an informal comedy monologue that comes mostly from her life.
DeGeneres' love of animals is a frequent theme on the show. This week there was much talk of a large bird that has been threatening her koi pond. Next week, Bay Area fans can expect at least some mention of a dog she adopted during her recent Bay Area trip.
While visiting KNTV's Battery Street studios on Sept. 5, she saw another newscast featuring an Oakland SPCA orphan. A few phone calls later, and the 12- week-old female border collie was rushed to the airport.
The dog has since been adopted (DeGeneres is calling her "Oakland"), and is now a Los Angeles resident. Oakland has gone on an incredible journey, and in some ways, that makes her a better guest than whoever is on the cover of Vanity Fair this week.
"People keep saying, 'What are you going to do to make this (show) different?' " DeGeneres said. "I don't know, and I hope I never do know. I hope I never figure out what people like about me or what they don't like about me. It's none of my business."
Article from The San Fransisco Chronicle
