Ellen DeGeneres, Netflix Special review - no mea culpa and few jokes

Hard to imagine it now, but just a few years ago Ellen DeGeneres was one of America’s biggest daytime TV stars; her chatshow The Ellen DeGeneres Show attracted Hollywood stars and politicians and she was paid millions for it. But then, in 2022, it was cancelled amid accusations there was a toxic atmosphere on set created by senior members of her team. This is the context of For Your Approval, which the comic says is her last stand-up appearance.

The Netflix Special starts with a film giving a brief overview of DeGeneres’ career before she comes on stage to a standing ovation, the first of the evening. (The audience, who whoop and holler at almost everything she says, very quickly become an irritant.)

DeGeneres muses on how she used to say she didn’t care what people thought of her. But then, she doesn’t do Botox as she used to when she didn’t care what people thought of her… It’s a neat reminder of how good a stand-up DeGeneres is with her smart wordplay, whimsy and dry delivery.

She then teases us with some anodyne fare about how car technology is designed to make us feel foolish, the difficulty of parking while you have an audience, and how in her enforced retirement she has started keeping chickens. 

It's amusing enough, but she knows we’re here to hear about the cancellation, and soon she addresses it, telling us how much she loved doing the chatshow and how everyone working on it became her family. Why, they’d even play japes, including a long-running game of tag and one involving scaring people on set by jumping out of cupboards at them. Hmm, a bit of a disconnect there.

She makes a fair point that 2022’s events were her second experience of cancellation; in 1998 timid television bosses pulled her very funny sitcom Ellen after DeGeneres came out as a lesbian. One would like to think it wouldn’t happen now, but…

Yet For Your Approval is no mea culpa, and instead DeGeneres makes a speech about losing her show because of her gender, which culminates in her also saying it’s because she’s a strong woman. Cue another standing ovation from the audience.

There is some comedy in the hour but not enough to punctuate what to my ears sounds disappointingly like “I’m a nice person, why can’t everybody see I’m a nice person?” It’s a shame as DeGeneres is a talented comic,  but you wouldn’t know it from this.

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