Ellen, or These Friends of Mine

That show was changing every season. It was funny but it had Saved By the Bell like continuity.

Because they redid the show three times and it just never gelled. She worked at a bookstore, she bought the bookstore, she sold the bookstore and stayed working there. She had three friends named Adam, Holly and Anita. Then she had Adam and Paige. And then Joe. And then Audrey. And then Adam left and cousin Spence showed up.

And they tried to make Ellen date and it was so awkward.

So they made her gay and bingo, TV history.

I wouldn't say Bingo. The show was 5 seasons and she didnt come out until the end of season 4.

Early seasons on the show weren't particularly funny. Oh, there was an occasional episode that made me laugh, but overall the show wasn't that good. Definitely wasn't gelling.

It was very weird to watch a show reinvent itself on screen over and over again -- this group of supporting players aren't working, so we'll gradually fire all of them and hire new ones. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

Her character became gay when it was evident ABC was going to cancel the show. They thought, what the hell, we'll be canceled(due to poor ratings)anyway.

Everyone who watched the last season has posted in this thread.

I think her character came out as gay when she did because she's not a strong enough actor not to play herself.

Oh, I know, I don't get why people just don't come out earlier!

It was argued that the last season was "TOO gay," that it became a bit political in that regard and it just wasn't as funny. Which is attributable to the writing, of course.

Did Piven get along with Ellen? Has he ever commented on his time on the series? Has he ever been on her talk show?

R7, maybe that's why she doesn't act anymore.

The show was horrible. Degeneres wasn't much of an actress or a comic. They kept reshuffling the cast and format. Her coming out was one of the few times where the show didn't make me cringe--the next few episodes, too. The coming out raised the ratings, but the show died in its last season. The blame is usually put on Ellen having inciorporated her lesbianism into the plot lines, but frankly the show had limped along without that. She's fine on her talk show and that seems to be where she belongs.

Maybe I'm remembering wrongly, but I though Ellen was doing ok when they cancelled it; better ratings than, say Spin City, which carried on for ages.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

I think Ellen went overboard the last season too, but ABC wasn't blameless, putting up that black-screen before every episode warning of controversial subject matter not suitable for children. If losing offended viewers was their worry, why not let the show sink or swim on its own instead of treating it like porn and guaranteeing viewers would be turned away.

It was a more innocent time.

I always thought it was odd that the Ellen character owned a bookstore yet never talked about books or even seemed to have ever read one.

The bookstore seemed like a coffee house with a few books on the wall for decoration.

R16, that's a great point.

tran$phobic ci$gender troll alert!!

[quote]I always thought it was odd that the Ellen character owned a bookstore yet never talked about books or even seemed to have ever read one.

She had a book club with the skinny guy from Boston Common and the Indian guy who is now Raj's dad on the Big Bang Theory.

Friends really borrowed from TFOM and TFOM started borrowing from Friends.

Ellen's face looks different now.

Please. It made perfect sense. Ellen had zero chemistry with any male that was not a regular male friend.

It was ok and funny at one point, and then when she came out it was unfunny because it was just obvious "gay" jokes over and over.

[quote]it was just obvious "gay" jokes over and over.

So was Will and Grace. In fact, WG was worse.

At least Ellen still has her talk show to fall back on.

Seasons 1 and 5 were bad. But I really loved the seasons inbetween. The Audrey / Paige / Joe / Spencer dynamic was very good. Ellen's parents were hilarious and so were Audrey's. Very fun loving, innocent show. I makes me want to watch it again.

I remember a pre-coming-out episode where Janeane Garofalo best starred as a woman Ellen met at the clinic when she was getting some cancer tests done. Later Ellen kept thinking about her and was nervous about calling the phone number that the Janenne had given her. Finally some chemistry on this show.

The episode with the lobster and Mary Tyler Moore was hilarious

Ummmm,, have you ever actually seen Ellen? She has virtually NO chemistry with males - especially romantic chemistry. She does have some cute moments with males on her talk show, but it is all in fun since she is out - which is half the fun.

Oh do shut up.

Whether or not Arye Gross was fired still isn't clear -- at the time he said he wanted to leave but later he sounded as if he'd been fired.

I liked every incarnation of the show. I miss those light-hearted sit-coms about 20/30-somethings dating and learning about life.

Tired of shows that are just a mirror of their viewers: flyover fatties bitching and moaning.

I loved the show and still use lines from it.

The Coming Out was fine. What wrecked the show was selling the bookstore to two geeks who then had Bruce Campbell manage it while Ellen was just a worker bee (or assistant manager or whatever). SO unnecessary! It became so clunky and awkward.

The 1995 Thanksgiving episode with Martha Stewart is one of the funniest episodes of any show I've ever seen - and Ellen was totally dyking out in that one. No mention at all of Ellen Morgan's "heterosexuality." Season Three really downplayed Ellen's attraction to men.

So, her Coming Out was not that out of the blue.

Also, the first two seasons in 1994 had Adam constantly wearing Gap fashions!

Truly funny and enjoyable to watch:

Didn't Ellen "date" Arye Gross during Season 1?

Ellen had lots of beards back then, as well as being a co-beard.

What ever happened to the little ginger queen that played one of her friends? He was everywhere in the late 90s/early 2000s when a show required a fussy little gay guy.

Ellen DeGeneres on "These Friends of Mine," the original title of her TV series: "It was bad."

Ellen DeGeneres on her show's initial opening title sequence, in which she and those friends of hers cavorted in the desert and did leg-kicks: "Everyone hated that. . . . (Shooting) it was a hellacious time. . . . I don't know where that came from, I have no idea."

Ellen DeGeneres on two mystery episodes that will not run: "They were just bad. Bad ideas, bad. . . . ABC paid a lot of money for them, but I begged them not to run them."

Ellen DeGeneres on some of the episodes that did run: "It's like having a photo of you that you hate and the whole world is out there looking at it going, 'God, that's hideous.' And you think, 'I know it is; so why are you looking at it?' "

Hard to believe she's talking about a hit show, isn't it?

DeGeneres' show was an instant ratings smash as a replacement series this spring, and it enters its sophomore season--retitled "Ellen" at the behest of the network--in a plum position, following "Roseanne" on Wednesday nights.

Moreover, DeGeneres, whose first act as a stand-up comic 14 years back consisted mainly of munching on a Whopper, has now become, more or less, the symbol of a network: ABC has announced that she will be the network's spokeswoman in radio ads and on-air promos, personally introducing the debut of every show in ABC's lineup this fall--an almost unprecedented vote of confidence. She's also co-hosting the Emmy Awards telecast on ABC Sept. 11.

Yet ABC held the series back more than a year after the first episodes were taped. And in its earlier incarnation, "These Friends of Mine" was a textbook case of how even the engine that powers the machine has no control over the steering wheel. Staff defections, critical jabs, a brief production shutdown to regain creative focus, and DeGeneres' own dissatisfaction with some of the writing made the program's success less sweet than it should have been.

*

"As in any business, there are creative, talented people and then there are people who could have been working at IBM, but they're working at a studio instead, and people who have no idea what the creative side is, they just look at the business side," DeGeneres observes. "That's frustrating."

Even though significant moves were taken during the show's hiatus to ensure that everyone concerned was on the same page artistically, the recent departure of executive producer Wendy Goldman after only 10 weeks on the job suggests there may be a few more kinks to be ironed out.

DeGeneres, who mirrors her TV character, Ellen Morgan, in her look-on-the-bright-side demeanor and eager-to-please friendliness, casts the negatives in an upbeat light. "Even if it's bad, and it hurts, at least you're now somebody to talk about," she says.

"As far as the creative struggle now, ABC has really just taken control of the ship and said where it's going. They said: 'It's going to be called "Ellen," and it's going to be more about Ellen.' It wasn't even me standing up and saying things should change."

Disney, the show's production house, "didn't want to call the show 'Ellen,' " DeGeneres says. "They had a rule: They didn't want to call a show by the star's name. We asked many, many times. 'Couch People' was one of the suggested names for the show, and we were, 'Omigod! Why would anyone want to watch a show called "Couch People"?' "

When DeGeneres signed on for the series, she says, executive producers Neil Marlens and Carol Black "really had all the clout," but following internal disagreements regarding the direction of the program, they left after a handful of episodes. Many critics dismissed the show as "Seinfeld Lite," and more, who were fans of DeGeneres, responded as your parents might--they weren't mad, just disappointed.

Without an executive producer who truly understood and appreciated DeGeneres' own distinctive comic sensibilities, as Larry David does with Jerry Seinfeld, her perspective was submerged, and the show was less sophisticated and more risque than her stand-up persona (the pilot tried to eke laughs out of a character who barked like a dog during sex).

"What ultimately people were saying was, 'How come the show is not what you do?' " DeGeneres concedes. "That's because I didn't have a Larry David. . . . If someone's trying to create a show for you, unless they've been your writing partner for the whole 14 years, they can try and they can come really close, but that's why no one's written for me in the past 14 years, because I write the best for myself. They tried, they gave it a good shot, and these producers are trying, they're getting closer, and they're seeing more what they can do. And eventually they're going to hit the bull's-eye."

Part of the problem, perhaps, was that DeGeneres was so happy just having her own show that she was too willing to please others and didn't assert her own vision--in other words, a rare case of a star not having enough ego. "I felt I was the lucky one," she says. "They were giving me this wonderful break. I've learned that I have a large part to do with the show and I should speak up and say, 'This is not what I would want to do.' "

David Rosenthal, who wrote for "Laurie Hill," an earlier series on which DeGeneres co-starred, and a co-creator and executive producer of "Ellen," adds: "Unfortunately, we didn't have the benefit of being on the air when shooting those first shows. There was more than a year between taping the shows and their airing. That's a lot of time to go without audience feedback. The criticism came in a vacuum. There was no public response."

When "Ellen" returns Sept. 21, last season's clunky title and the cloying title sequence will be gone, as will actress Holly Fulger. (Another actress, Maggie Wheeler, left after the first six episodes.) Joely Fisher joins the cast as Paige, Ellen's childhood chum.

"Holly is a wonderful actress, but ultimately the problem was she projected a real vulnerability, which is what Ellen does as well, and they stepped on each other," Rosenthal explains. "Paige has more of an edge, a tougher, bolder side. She's more act-now-think-later."

Adam (Arye Gross), Ellen's platonic roommate, will return, but sans goatee and his more weaselly impulses. Adam didn't test all that well with audiences, Rosenthal explains, "so we cleaned him up, made him a little sweeter."

Mainly, though, "Ellen" will focus on Ellen, particularly her talent for talking her way into and out of uncomfortable situations. "My feeling is, Ellen is the funniest person in the room--it would be foolish not to listen to her," Rosenthal says.

In Studio 3 on the Disney lot in Burbank, DeGeneres is rehearsing a scene in which Ellen Morgan visits her dentist, a handsome gent she just happens to have a crush on. DeGeneres, wearing a "Late Show With David Letterman" T-shirt and sweat pants, lets loose with her beaming, appealingly childlike smile as she begins playing with the dentist's chair. She hits a button once, it whirs and elevates her; hits it again, it whirs her back down. She hits the buttons so that the chair undulates up and down as quickly as it can, but still at a soporific pace, and, ad-libbing, throws an arm upward, like a suburban cowgirl atop the kind of dull, listless mechanical bull that lawyers would have designed in order to avoid lawsuits.

In general, DeGeneres' bumpy ride through the world of network television has gotten smoother. The episode's centerpiece is a sequence in which Ellen, under the influence of nitrous oxide, flirts shamelessly and humiliatingly with her dentist. "If I had a scene like this in every show, I'd be ecstatic," DeGeneres says. "It's, 'You're attracted to this guy, you're on nitrous: Go.' "

Of course, none of this might have happened had DeGeneres not become so disillusioned with stand-up. After laboring long years to create a unique comic persona that, she says, revealed and distorted "all sides of me to form a sneeze guard to protect me from the public," she got burned out about five years ago, weary of having to compete with slick yet lame wanna-bes and opportunists who stole her material.

"When I first started on the road and somebody on the plane would ask me what I did and I'd say, 'I'm a comedian,' they'd look at me like I was a gunslinger. That was weird. Then it got to the point where saying 'I'm a comedian' was like saying, 'I'm an attorney'. . . . It got to the point where I hated saying I was a comedian."

Cable TV helped destroy the integrity of stand-up, she says. "Everybody suddenly realized: 'We can have a half-hour program, and you don't have to pay actors huge sums of money. You have a set that's a brick wall. And put up five people, pay 'em scale and you own 'em forever. You get different guys every week, and you have a show.' All of a sudden, you started running out of good comedians and anybody got on television."

On her farewell tour, however, she regained a smidgen of appreciation for what she had done all those years.

"After a show, I usually just kind of say thank you and leave, but in New York, I just kind of watched everybody stand up and listened to the applause for the first time in a long time, because you get so used to that," she recalls. "And it really kind of--I let it in. It was weird. I was thinking, 'This is a really nice thing that not too many people get to experience,' and here I was taking it for granted for so long."

Though her series is only entering its second season, DeGeneres is already looking forward to a time when she'll no longer do TV. Call it the David Caruso syndrome.

"I don't want to be 50 years old going 'Aaaaaugh!' You see those people on the talk shows and they have the one catch phrase and they do it and the audience goes crazy," she says, the distaste of the idea apparent on her face.

"It's so uncomfortable. You watch 'I Love Lucy,' which is wonderful, then you see 'The Lucy Show,' and you're just cringing. Somebody should've stopped her. Somebody should've said, 'Don't do TV anymore.' "

Sunny red haired Peter Barnes was played by sunny, red haired Patrick Bristow.

Bristow, but no clues on his sudden disappearance, other than Bush II's election

'ELLEN' OBJECTS TO PERCEPTION THAT SHE'S WIELDING AN AX

Jan 15, 1996

Few shows have changed more in the past couple of years than ABC's "Ellen."

All of the cast, with the exception of star Ellen DeGeneres, has changed. The sets have changed. The producers and writers have changed. Even the name of the show has changed - it started out as "These Friends of Mine."And all of that turmoil has led to widespread reports that DeGeneres herself has been more or less lopping off the heads of the people she works with - a charge she vigorously denied when talking to TV critics here.

"I never fired anybody," DeGeneres said. "That's absolutely false. Whenever I see stuff like that or read stuff like that, it's upsetting. People are going to assume what they want to assume."

Since it debuted as a midseason replacement show in the spring of 1994, "Ellen" has been trying to find itself. Repeatedly. And there were lots of people trying to help it look.

"Between the studio and the network everybody said, 'Let's try to make some changes in the characters and the show. But it was nothing to do with anybody being unhappy or being fired," DeGeneres said.

The most recent departure came when Arye Gross - the last remaining member of the original supporting cast - left "Ellen" earlier this season. And while it was reported that he was unhappy about being dropped from the show, DeGeneres denied that was true.

"He wasn't really happy with where his character was going," she said. "I don't think anybody really knew what to do with (his) Adam character. It had changed so much from the different changes the show has gone through.

"And it was mutual agreement that he wanted to go off, and we were fine with understanding that. It wasn't like there was anybody mad at anybody."

But it has been more than just the on-camera cast that has changed, a fact that DeGeneres herself joked about.

"We have had 43 producers," she said. "They keep spontaneously combusting."

Actually, the show is on its third set of executive producers - and that's not counting the revolving door that has seen other producers and writers come and go. But DeGeneres not only denied responsibility for all the changes, she said she actually didn't know about some of them until they had occurred.

"I do find out about things after the fact," she said. "I think because sometimes I don't exert this power that everyone believes that I have. Sometimes I really just want to have a life. I want to go home and I don't want it to be a 24-hour-a-day job. I want to just do my work and the best I can.

"So sometimes things do get done. And all of a sudden, I go, 'Wait a minute, what's going on here?' So that does happen."

In a day when female sitcom stars from Roseanne to Brett Butler to Cybill Shepherd seemingly delight in their images as iron-fisted powers behind the scenes, DeGeneres seems genuinely unhappy that she has become the latest alleged power wielder.

"I think sometimes people don't want to believe that things are actually fine on the set," DeGeneres said. "It's boring to read that things are fine and nice and I'm a nice person. I think people want to believe that because people are leaving it has to be because I fired them. And I have no idea where it comes from."

And she said that while she had experience as a stand-up comedian as well as in supporting roles on other sitcoms, she didn't didn't know what she was getting into when she signed on to headline her own show.

"You suddenly get a TV show and you suddenly become this person that is watched and studied," DeGeneres said. "And it's a very interesting place to be. You go through different phases of what it means and how important it is to you. But, ultimately, I try to just really look at the importance and what my priorities are in life."

And, mind you, she's not complaining about being a TV star.

"It's a wonderful job," DeGeneres said. "I am very fortunate. I love what I do.

"As far as putting the kind of pressure on that I am an industry or a product, I don't even want to think about that because I'm a person and that's all I can handle."

I don't care if Ellen hates the series or various episodes.

I love the whole series. Not every episode equally, of course, but it's a series I cherish.

Remember Audrey saying something like Ellen had the "glow of a womany love"?

[quote] Though her series is only entering its second season, DeGeneres is already looking forward to a time when she'll no longer do TV. Call it the David Caruso syndrome.

[quote] [bold]"I don't want to be 50 years old going 'Aaaaaugh!' You see those people on the talk shows and they have the one catch phrase and they do it and the audience goes crazy," she says, the distaste of the idea apparent on her face. [/bold]

And, yet, here we are...

So why is Arye Gross no longer Ellen DeGeneres’s buddy on her hit ABC sitcom Ellen? It depends on whom you ask. I hear he got fired after objecting to DeGeneres—who is not the show’s director—giving him stage directions. A rep for the show vehemently denies that Gross was given the heave-ho, saying the actor asked before the season began to be let out of his contract to pursue a film career. All Gross will say is that while “I was not initially pleased, I’m happy to have put all that behind me.” He will next be seen with Nick Nolte in the movie Mother Night, due out in the fall of 1996….

MITCHELL FINK December 04, 1995 12:00 PM

I loved the opening themes.

Today in a rerun, Ellen helped out Paige by pretending to be a trainer while pitching books to be made into films.

R52: Wasn't that the same backdrop Blossom used for the credits of her show?

The show really was not funny at all until Ellen came out. Then you had a season that was not groundbreaking in form, but was actually funny with characters that seemed closer to actual humans.

So of course it was cancelled.

Bristow looks much better now than he did when he was young.

The disaster that was Paige's wedding was a rip off of Saffy's first wedding in AbFab. There was even singing.

A very young Connie Britton played Paige's sister.

Talented ensemble.

[quote]It was very weird to watch a show reinvent itself on screen over and over again -- this group of supporting players aren't working, so we'll gradually fire all of them and hire new ones. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

Yeah they were dumb to do that

[quote]Whether or not Arye Gross was fired still isn't clear -- at the time he said he wanted to leave but later he sounded as if he'd been fired.

We all know what happened.

Holly Fulger could have worked out long time.

Frasier and his brother were mirrors of each other.

[quote]The bookstore seemed like a coffee house with a few books on the wall for decoration.

Well, books ARE awfully decorative!