(4 of 6)
Well, they could have wagered a few easy guesses. The news that Ellen Morgan would come out brought predictable applause from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which is building a national "Come Out with Ellen" day around the episode; and predictable denunciations from the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who referred to the star in gentlemanly fashion as "Ellen DeGenerate," and from the Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, whose American Family Association has issued barely veiled threats to boycott Ellen's advertisers. A stalwart ABC says it nevertheless expects that Ellen will be fully sponsored, although two occasional advertisers on Ellen, J.C. Penney and Chrysler, have announced they won't continue to sponsor the show. This can't have made ABC happy. But even for controversial shows there are usually enough advertisers to go around if the ratings promise to be high enough, which controversy often ensures. The network remains optimistic.
In less vested precincts of Hollywood, there seems to be little consensus about how the show will do. "What you'll find is that Ellen is going to take a hit on this," says Dick Wolf, creator of Law & Order. "If it was my show I probably wouldn't have done it. This is one specific area that a large percentage of the population is still very uncomfortable with." Bruce Helford, the Drew Carey producer, is more bullish: "I think there will be a big spike in the ratings. But if it's just one big thing and then they go back to the same show, and she's a lesbian, but the same old things happen to her, the boost won't last."
He is getting at something that has long plagued Ellen, which sometimes feels like Seinfeld after a game of telephone. Although the show debuted three years ago in the Nielsens top five as These Friends of Mine, the sitcom has since stumbled through a number of cast, staff and time-slot changes, never quite jelling creatively, even by DeGeneres' estimation, and settling into the ratings' upper midrange. A major problem has been the indistinct character of Ellen Morgan, who seems to drift wackily through each show without ever offering much in the way of believable motivation, even in the elastic sense that usually applies to sitcoms. For a while she owned a bookstore, but the profession seemed more an arbitrary choice to inject "workplace humor." After the second season she stopped dating--some writers say because DeGeneres was uncomfortable with overtly heterosexual story lines, although she says she simply wasn't interested in doing a show that focused on relationships. As it happens, the code working title of the coming-out script, The Puppy Episode, is an in-joke reference to one of the lamer attempts to juice up the show: an executive's suggestion--DeGeneres won't say whose--that the show's creative problems might be solved if Ellen Morgan got a puppy.
Was Ellen Morgan really gay all along, before not only the character knew it but DeGeneres and the writers as well? According to Dava Savel, one of Ellen's three executive producers, sparks often flew between DeGeneres and female guests. She cites in particular an episode with Janeane Garafalo. "There wasn't supposed to be a lesbian thing at all, but afterward we were watching the tape and we were like, 'Whoa!'"