Ellen is talking, viewers are listening

After a career slide, Ellen DeGeneres rebounds with a successful talk show, doing what she really wants to do: making people laugh.

LOS ANGELES - If Ellen DeGeneres is carrying heavy baggage these days, it's only because she has stuffed it with Emmys.

Crowning a successful first season for The Ellen DeGeneres Show, DeGeneres accepted the best talk show trophy at Friday's Daytime Emmy Awards in New York.

The syndicated series also received three Emmys for technical achievement, making it this year's most honored talk show.

Not bad for a woman who feared her career had suffered permanent damage when she came out as a lesbian on Ellen, her former sitcom. All it took was a family-friendly hit movie (Finding Nemo), an HBO special and the daytime show to give DeGeneres back what she wanted: humor without agenda.

"I'm a comedian. I want to make people laugh," she said in a recent interview. "Somehow, I was viewed as political when I just want to be a comedian."

With her determinedly lighthearted show, DeGeneres is getting her wish. It's one of the handful of new daytime talk shows to score with audiences in the past decade.

Since fall 1995, television executives have launched 38 weekday talk shows in daytime, said Jim Paratore, president of Warner Bros. Telepictures Productions, which is producing DeGeneres' show.

Only The Rosie O'Donnell Show and Dr. Phil were hits, Paratore said. Now he figures The Ellen DeGeneres Show can be added to the list.

It launched a year ago and wraps its first season Friday, although a few unaired shows will be scattered among the summer reruns.

Its total audience ratings are below that of blockbusters like Oprah Winfrey's top-rated talk show, but DeGeneres' show draws a hefty slice of the viewers advertisers covet.

"It's all about the demos," said Paratore, using industry slang referring to the show's largely 25- to 54-year-old demographic.

"The audience it reaches is the primo, upscale, soccer mom target audience," he said, adding that the show is a must-buy for many advertisers.

When its second season begins Sept. 6, there will be clear signs of the show's popularity: It will be upgraded in 38 of the top 100 markets, getting better time slots or airing on a network affiliate instead of an independent station.

DeGeneres is enjoying the ride: a far tamer one than her last TV adventure.

In 1997, she and her sitcom character came out as a lesbian on Ellen. Before Will & Grace, before Queer As Folk, before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it fell to DeGeneres to serve as the TV focus for the issues of gay visibility and acceptability.

The sitcom lasted just one season more after a drop in ratings, and DeGeneres found her career in a slump. She tried resurrecting it with another sitcom, The Ellen Show in 2001, but it was short-lived.

Then came her endearing voice performance in 2003's Finding Nemo, as a forgetful fish named Dory, and an HBO standup special in which she pointedly avoided politics in favor of the whimsical observational humor that has marked her career.

But when Telepictures set out to sell her talk show, it found reluctance among some station owners and managers. "We knew there was baggage," Paratore said, and the concerns had to be addressed.

The station executives "needed to be shown that people would give me another chance," DeGeneres said. The message she delivered: "You don't know me, you know a perception of me" based on news reports.

Despite the career rough patch, she "wouldn't change one single thing that happened," DeGeneres said.

"I feel like the success is even sweeter. I'm so grateful I have another chance. I can relax, and not have any secrets."

The Ellen DeGeneres Show airs weekdays at 10 a.m. on WTSP-Ch. 10.

Entertainment headlines