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Ellen DeGeneres has canceled herself — literally. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ellen DeGeneres will be bringing her long-running NBC daytime talk show The Ellen Show to an end in 2022.
“When you’re a creative person, you constantly need to be challenged – and as great as this show is, and as fun as it is, it’s just not a challenge anymore,” DeGeneres tells THR.
Despite how DeGeneres may be trying to spin it, it’s certainly no coincidence that the announcement comes barely a year after news broke that the culture on the set of the
The Ellen Show was extremely toxic, with Ellen herself being labeled as one of the “meanest people alive” in a viral Twitter thread.
The news about DeGeneres’ on-set behavior had a tangible impact on the success of the show, as a report from the New York Times revealed that Ellen Show viewership “has dropped by 1.1 million people this season, from 2.6 million viewers to 1.5 million viewers.” That’s a 43% decline in viewership. Perhaps more worrying for Ellen, though, was the fact that those numbers also represented a 38% decline in viewership from adult women under 54, which is obviously her core audience.
DeGeneres, though, denies that the allegations factored into her decision to end the show:
“If I was quitting the show because of that [the allegations], I wouldn’t have come back this season. So, it’s not why I’m stopping,” she told THR.
Sure, Ellen, whatever you say. We all definitely believe you.
Regardless, just because The Ellen Show is ending does not mean that Ellen’s television ventures will, as her new HBO Max series Ellen’s Next Great Designer just premiered on the streamer in late April.
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