Revisiting Morley (Chapter 7) in looking at the failure of the Ellen series

In CTCS 500: Film Theory, we looked at the Ellen sitcom as part of our introduction to television theory. I’d like to revisit David Morley’s Home Territories in order to address the Ellen sitcom and its failure. Specifically, I’d like to address Ellen’s queer historical significance and problematic temporality of queerness as raised by Anna McCarthy in her article Ellen : Making Queer Television History, while bringing the discussion into a larger arena of temporal significance and subjectivity for mediated Othering that David Morley addresses in Chapter 7 of Home Territories.

Ellen as a failed sitcom produced the opening for ‘queer’ to enter mainstream television, and achieved this by accidentally rupturing network television’s system of ‘Othering’. McCarthy, in part, takes up the notion of the historicized queerness that Ellen’s producers adopted for its palatable eventfulness in the context of the serial program. Ellen struggled with the ‘uneventfulness’ of queerness, insofar as this uneventfulness signifed to the viewer that queerness is now part of the homogeneous primary demographic (i.e. the portrayal of Ellen’s queerness in an everyday, normative sense in every episode as part of the serial model), which is an assertion that the major network, ABC, felt uncomfortable making in 1997. Morley raises the issue of how spatially and temporally television relegates ethnic Others to the periphery (i.e. 10 oclock news, public programming, Logo, etc.). Moreover, within the spatial and temporal designations of certain demographics, he addresses the subjectivity that is granted to certain ethnic and racial demographics and denied of other demographics within different types of programming. Morley states, “Centrally, Hargreaves’ point is that, because of their confinement to ‘problem’ genres and their exclusion from light entertainment (and, on the whole, from television advertising), ethnic minoritiy and immigrant groups “are simply not represented as part of everyday life” (Morley, 164). Morley addresses issues of systematic Othering that is enacted by the media, issues that Ellen accidentally avoids and complicates throughout its serial lifespan.
How did a show about a lesbian protagonist live within the homogenous primary’s visibility on primetime ABC? Ellen shape-shifted during its lifespan and thus threw off all traditional efforts of relegating the show to a televisual sphere of the Other. McCarthy’s look at the way in which the ‘uneventfulness’ of queer became a formula that ABC could not effectively deliver, reveals the ways in which Morley’s discussion of a subjectivity played out during the Ellen series as the sexual orientation of the protagonist shifted from a heteronormative representation to a categorical Otherness. At the mid-series point of Ellen’s coming-out, her subjectivity could not be denied at this point during the series as the protagonist was already fixed, which gave way for visible problems in story arch and issues with the ‘uneventfulness’ of the protagonist’s identity.
Let’s consider, then, the series’ context in failure. While the show ended up failing the battle for continued visibility (and continued series) in 1998, Ellen won in terms of unveiling the problematics associated with visibility of homogeneous primary and periphery Other that the television networks staged in their narrative confusion and ultimate serial murder. Ellen and Ellen represent the lapse in the network’s process of Othering, in that they offered of subjectivity to a queer person by accident, thus working to perminently rupture and complicate notions of queerness as a designated Other for the primetime viewer.