As a child of a certain generation, I do not recall a time before the existence of Ellen DeGeneres’s daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. As far as I’m concerned Ellen has been white-lady dancing around the same stage in front of the same audience with a rotation of DJs for eternity. I assume there was a show in that slot before Ellen, I’m just not old enough to remember what that was. A soap opera, maybe? But like all things good or otherwise, it seems that the Ellen show may be winding its way toward that last sunset. Page Six reports that DeGeneres has one more year left on the contract for her show and negotiations for what happens after the year will begin next month.
Ellen the person reportedly wants out of Ellen the show, and considering that DeGeneres owns the rights to the show, the door leading to retirement is wide open. However, DeGeneres also has a coveted time slot and while she wants to hide out in her glass house from any more accusations of being a mean girl, production executives are hard-pressed to give up the single hour of the day that has so regularly produced millions for years. If the production company wants to keep the slot, they would have to launch a different show with a different format and a different host.
As one empire declines, another comes to fill in the gap and in this case, the next ruler of the late-afternoon talk show block could be Kelly Clarkson. Clarkson’s show has been seeing a rise in ratings while DeGeneres saw an eight percent decline, Page Six reports. Clarkson’s show also won three daytime Emmys and has a host that is not building their entire camera persona on being the nicest human being on earth.
Since I’ve not watched a daytime talk show for personal pleasure in about a decade, it doesn’t really matter which white woman gets to talk for an hour and give away free stuff to a studio audience. However, I do think it would be great for Kelly Clarkson to become more and more successful on the heels of her divorce, just to shove it in her ex’s face, and also to shove it in the face of every other American Idol contestant who won the show but had absolutely no career because that show stopped caring about singers when it allowed Clay Aiken to lose to Ruben Studdard. I said what I fucking said, Claymates you are not forgotten.