Former Employees of Ellen DeGeneres Trash Her Self-Pitying Stand-Up Special
In her new Netflix special Ellen DeGeneres: For Your Approval, the former queen of daytime TV comedy cried that she was “kicked out of show business” for being a “strong woman.” Meanwhile, the former employees of The Ellen DeGeneres Show wonder how exactly replacing her crew with non-union workers during COVID and firing people for going on medical or bereavement leave was a show of “strength.”
Before 10 employees of The Ellen DeGeneres Show came forward and accused their boss of creating a “toxic” workplace rife with "racism, fear and intimidation" in July 2020, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, elfish talk show host was synonymous with kindness and gentleness in popular culture, a brand that DeGeneres worked very hard to cultivate everywhere besides on her own set. Very quickly, the many “little people” whom the media giant had mistreated found their voices, and horror stories of DeGeneres’ bad behavior became common knowledge as millions of Twitter users gawked at the revelation that the multi-millionaire who claimed to make “be kind” her personal mantra would get a waitress fired for daring to serve the 33-time Emmy-winner with chipped nail polish.
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However, and despite the sudden dip in public opinion over the outpouring of allegations against the host, The Ellen DeGeneres Show trudged on mostly unperturbed until Warner Bros. finally ended the show in 2022. Today, DeGeneres is hawking her hour-long demand for America to once again view her as a paragon of empathy under the thin veil of a stand-up show, and, following the premiere of For Your Approval on September 24th, six of the comedian’s former staffers spoke to Rolling Stone in order to crash their old boss’ pity party.
“There’s a difference between your persona and the way that you were handled in the media versus the culture that you perpetuated which hurt a lot of people,” one former employee told Rolling Stone anonymously, reiterating what the public learned about DeGeneres in 2020 and what DeGeneres demands we forget about her now. “She was misrepresenting the narrative and trying to reframe herself as not a bully. … She really missed the mark.”
In For Your Approval, DeGeneres declines to address the most serious accusations made against her by the people over whom she held immense power, chalking up the occasional bizarre snake prank as a product of her playful sense of humor and painting the “mean stories” about her as sexist attempts to oppress a successful woman. “It feels like it’s manipulative,” one former employee said of the special. “You’re titling the show For Your Approval, which suggests that you’re trying to guilt the audience into feeling bad for you, and then you’re trying to empower yourself at the same time by saying that you endured all of this hard stuff.”
As Rolling Stone noted, DeGeneres made For Your Approval under a two-special deal with Netflix that netted her $40 million total for both the new show and the 2018 special Relatable, a point that her former staffers must raise after she claimed in the new special that she was “kicked out of show business.” Said one former employee, “She made millions of dollars doing a Netflix special talking about how she got canceled, but by nature of making millions of dollars to do a Netflix special, you were not silenced. You were not kicked out of Hollywood. Most people can’t get Netflix specials.”
And while DeGeneres desperately tries to force the general public to forget that they’d ever seen a less-than-saintly side of her, the people who got the worst of her bad behavior don’t have that option. “Even however many years removed I am from working there, seeing her just brings me back to that fear and that anxiety that I would have,” one staffer said of their experiences working for DeGeneres. “Literally, the sight of her gives me a trauma response. I can’t say that for any other job I’ve had in any other field.”
But, whether or (most likely) not DeGeneres’ whitewashing of her own workplace toxicity succeeds in restoring her compassionate image, this is far from the end of her comedy career, no matter what she may claim about being canceled. “I doubt this is the last time we’ll hear from her,” one employee predicted. “If there’s a big enough price tag on something, she’ll do it.”
