Word: sitcoms
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That became a lot harder last September when the news leaked, unintentionally by all accounts, that DeGeneres wanted to have the character she plays on Ellen, her three-year-old ABC sitcom, discover that she--the character, that is--is a lesbian. For DeGeneres, 39, the decision was the culmination of a long process of struggling with feelings about her own sexuality, her fears about being rejected for it, her wish to lead a more honest and open life in public, her weariness at the effort it took her not to. For the public, the news was a sensation...
...winter, ABC announced last month that the character of Ellen Morgan would indeed be coming out in a special one-hour episode on the last day of April, just in time for sweeps. That resolved, DeGeneres, who had felt constrained from speaking frankly about the issue while her sitcom's fate was still in the balance, is coming out too. "For me," she says, "this has been the most freeing experience because people can't hurt me anymore. I don't have to worry about somebody saying something about me, or a reporter trying to find out information. Literally...
...untrammeled license. Moral values are, of course, relative. Party of Five features yards of premarital sex, yet is also a warmer celebration of family bonds than, say, Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. Today there are new taboos. "Nobody's going to do abortion on a sitcom today, but Maude did it back in 1972," says Bruce Helford, co-creator and executive producer of The Drew Carey Show. He's referring to the famous episodes of Maude in which Bea Arthur's title character not only considered having an abortion, as a number of TV characters have...
...getting at something that has long plagued Ellen, which sometimes feels like Seinfeld after a game of telephone. Although the show debuted three years ago in the Nielsens top five as These Friends of Mine, the sitcom has since stumbled through a number of cast, staff and time-slot changes, never quite jelling creatively, even by DeGeneres' estimation, and settling into the ratings' upper midrange. A major problem has been the indistinct character of Ellen Morgan, who seems to drift wackily through each show without ever offering much in the way of believable motivation, even in the elastic sense that...
TIME: You were a stand-up comic before you started your sitcom. That must have been a difficult profession for someone closeted...