Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticEllen DeGeneres began her talk show when she was down on her luck, having experienced career turbulence thanks to prejudices against openly gay talent.
She will leave it, at the conclusion of the show’s 19th season in 2022, as among the most powerful women in entertainment.This is an outcome few might have predicted.
In the years after her 1997 coming-out — almost certainly, in its moment, the highest-profile confession of that sort to date — DeGeneres saw her sitcom fall away, and another attempt get cancelled in its first season.
She was a trailblazer, with all the cost that that implies, and a positive outcome of her talk show’s steady success is the degree to which it brought a gay woman into middle.
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