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This is the twenty-year anniversary of Ellen DeGeneres’ Puppy Episode which premiered on ABC today in 1997.  

The title–which came from the producers frustrated over Ellen’s character’s lack of interest in dating and relationships and suggesting the next season she get a puppy–was a way to keep Ellen’s secret before the episode aired. News of Ellen (both the character and the actress) coming out circulated between 1996 and 1997 while the writers were in negotiations with ABC and Disney about the episode. “Disney rejected the first draft of the script with Disney producer, Dean Valentine, stating that it did not go far enough. Director Junger reported Valentine said, “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it.” Other sources indicate that ABC was never supportive of this direction (DeGeneres and writers citing that the title of the episode was to keep the company from knowing what was happening before they could pull the idea) and blame DeGeneres’ more “political” direction resulting in the demise of the show.

DeGeneres’ character became the first openly gay lead character on network television. Though the highest rated Ellen episode, winner of Emmys for Outstanding Writing For a Comedy Series and Outstanding Multi-Camera Picture Editing, and winner of Peabody Award as well as DeGeneres winning GLAAD Media Award in 1998, the show was cancelled after one more season (in which before every episode, ABC gave a parental advisory content warning) and Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern received a lot of hate for a long time. During the tenth anniversary special on DeGeneres’ talk show, Dern explained that she lost at least a year and a half of work due to the episode. She also said, she was thankful for the “extraordinary experience and opportunity” of that part she played.

DeGeneres publicly came out on Time Magazine on April 14, 1997 (Yep, I’m Gay) and went on The Oprah Winfrey Show with her then-girlfriend, Anne Heche, on April 30, 1997.  

GLAAD cites this episode for giving space for shows such as Will and Grace, The L Word, and Ugly Betty and this episode has been ranked 46th by TVGuide as “100 Greatest Episodes of All Time”.

After the cancellation, DeGeneres began to work in stand-up. She briefly came back to situational comedy in The Ellen Show in 2001, where her character was explicitly lesbian from the start, before finding success as the host of her daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Season Four Episodes Twenty-Two and Twenty-Three. You can watch the two part special here and here.  

You can watch more episodes on Ellen after coming out and dealing with her parents, boss, and her best friend.

On April 28, 2017 Ellen hosted a reunion episode on her daytime talk show and you can watch that here.

~lex lee.

so in one of my classes we were making moodboards, just pieces of paper with magazine cutouts that represent us pasted all over them and this guy i’ve never talked to leans over and he’s like ‘you’re gay, right’ and i’m like ‘…sort of?’ and he silently handed me a cutout of ellen degeneres and went back to his work

petition to crown Ellen DeGeneres and Neil Patrick Harris king and queen of the United States