Ellen DeGeneres has had a long career as an entertainer that began in with stand-up comedy in the 1980s and transitioned into television and movies in the 90s. After her sitcom Ellen was canceled in 1998 and was then followed by another failed sitcom and some bad movies, it seemed that she was destined to join the ranks of the Hollywood has-beens. However, all of that changed when in 2003 the wildly successful animated movie Finding Nemo was released and she began the Daytime Emmy award-winning talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
As daytime talk shows go, The Ellen DeGeneres Show is pretty much the standard fare of celebrities and “normal” people. Most of what has made the show successful is DeGeneres herself. By incorporating her own wacky and often irreverent sense of humor to the show, as well as a willingness to laugh at herself, she has endeared herself to millions of viewers around the world.
The first two seasons of The Ellen DeGeneres Show reshaped the daytime talk show genre, bringing it out of the realms of crazy people and product promotions and incorporating the entertainment of late night talk shows, but without the crass humor. Unfortunately, the latter half of the third season and into the fourth seems to be moving more towards product-promotions-as-content. Thankfully, fans have the The Ellen DeGeneres Show: DVD-licious collection to remind us of happier times.
The DVD set contains two discs. The first disc is a collection of DeGeneres’ favorite clips from the first three seasons, and the second disc is her favorite monologues. All of them are quite entertaining and on the whole they convey the essence of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It’s definitely a must-have for fans, but it does not hold up well as a stand-alone. Without the context of the show structure and history, viewers might not “get” some of the humor.
The Ellen DeGeneres Show: DVD-licious has been on sale exclusively in Target stores since September, and heavily promoted on the show. Tuesday was the official release to all other markets, but I suspect that the impact of that release will have been somewhat diminished by the long promotion period. However, I would not be surprised if copies of this DVD end up under Christmas trees and Hanukkah bushes this season.
