Ellen: The Puppy Episode

Ellen: The Puppy Episode
ABC
April 30, 1997
Sitcom
DVD
A-

Ellen DeGeneres's story was turned into a teleplay by staff writers Driscoll, Newman, Savel, and Stark.  It would win an Emmy and change television forever.  Forty-two million people tuned in.  For a couple weeks I decided I was a lesbian.  (Then I became deeply infatuated with a man and went back to identifying as bisexual, like I had since I was a preschooler.)

But is it still entertaining?  Heck yeah!  It is sharp, hilarious, joyous, and a little bit heartbreaking.  Even things like Ellen's awkwardness and babbling fit remarkably well, as she struggles through her sexual identity and her feelings for a woman named Susan (Laura Dern, just right).  Here it was, twenty years after Jodie on Soap, and it was a struggle to even get the story on the air, and that comes through even now, in the performances of the cast, including Oprah Winfrey as the wise and dry-humored therapist, and in the obviously thrilled studio audience.  OK, the celebrity cameos aren't all as obvious as they were then, although it's still a delight to hear Melissa Etheridge serenade a blushing Ellen for her bravery, or to watch K. D. Lang play a waitress.

The episode is of course mostly about Ellen, and those friends of hers are featured less, but they all have their moments (yes, even Spence), like Audrey's enthusiastic literal and figurative embrace of Ellen, and of course Peter's joy at Ellen telling him first (not counting Susan, the therapist, and the people at the airport).  It's an hour-long episode so I could go on and on, but I just want to mention three things, two of them related to the photos I've chosen.  The other is a moment where the therapist compares the prejudice that Ellen fears to what blacks underwent before the Civil Rights Movement.  In the hands of lesser writers, or lesser performers, this could be awkward and/or heavy-handed, but the moment makes its point with a light touch.  (One shudders to imagine how this would've gone on Roseanne in the last couple seasons.)

When Ellen finds the courage to first speak the words, "I'm gay," it's accidentally into the airport p.a. system.  This is another moment that might not have worked, but it does, helped partly by the visible relief of Ellen (Morgan and DeGeneres) afterwards, and the hug Susan gives her.  Note that this scene, just as much as some of the airport scenes on Who's the Boss? five or more years earlier, looks surreal after 9/11.  You simply can't go up and hug someone about to board a plane, as Ellen does.  (I haven't mentioned Ellen's date with her old friend Richard, but there are some laughs from that in the first half of the episode.)

Susan has a seemingly throwaway line about failing to "recruit" Ellen and thus losing a chance at a toaster oven.  Then we get the tag scene that pays off from that, with Etheridge enthusiastically stamping Ellen's application (and the clipboard).  "Toaster oven" would become (if it wasn't already) an LGBT (not yet Q or A) semi-in-joke for the next few years, and the scene is funny in of itself.  Just an all around wonderful episode.  (But, no, not an A or A+.  I don't think TV can achieve that like books or movies can.)

Waiter Patrick Harrigan had previously been Customer No. 1.  Kathy Najimy makes her third and last appearance on the show, in the very small role of a Woman in Gay Bar (technically a coffeehouse).  This time DeGeneres's mother Betty is a Woman at Airport.