Earnest ‘Ellen’ Not Very Funny

I’m pretty sure I know what was going through the minds of “Ellen’s” writers, and what led them to those misjudgments that effectively killed their show, (“Ratings, Not Sexuality, Steer Future of ‘Ellen,’ ” Calendar, March 11) because I too am a bleeding-heart liberal weenie. So I know there is a tendency among my type that wants to “reform” comedy, to make it cruelty-free, dolphin-safe and good for you, like broccoli.

This may explain why almost everyone on “Ellen” came across as excruciatingly sincere, responsible, respectable and politically correct--in other words, unfunny. Friends and family members “worked through” their issues with Ellen’s sexuality and eventually were “OK with it.” Ellen’s girlfriend even had a teenage daughter who was OK with it--which strikes me as a great comedic opportunity wasted; it would have been amusing to watch Ellen trade barbs with a 14-year-old archconservative. But no such luck: All of “Ellen’s” supporting players were drawn straight from the Gay Book of Virtues.

Nor did it help for us to be dragged along on a lesbian field trip, as if we were being introduced to an exotic wildlife form: Ellen’s first kiss, Ellen’s first date, Ellen’s first relationship. Contrary, I’m sure, to the writers’ intentions was an impression left with many viewers that coming out can actually kill brain cells, because Ellen shambled through these episodes like a clueless, preternaturally aged adolescent.

But the ultimate irony is that “Ellen’s” writers--so earnest, so prosaic and so eager to make television history with these breakthrough episodes--had actually fallen behind the cultural curve. It’s a fact rarely acknowledged, but long before Ellen’s coming out, Americans already had embraced and lavished praise upon a truly gay sitcom. I refer, of course, to “Seinfeld.”

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Yes, “Seinfeld” is gay--or at least it is much closer to a gay sensibility than what “Ellen” exhibits. “Seinfeld’s” creators assume an outsider stance to popular culture, which was formerly the vernacular of gay and minority subcultures. The lead characters are scabrous, vindictive, disloyal, capricious, obsessed with minutiae and harassed by dysfunctional aging parents--in other words, they’re not trying to be Middle America, or at least not the nostalgic view of Middle America that most of TV portrays.

As its creator Larry David once remarked, “Nobody learns, nobody hugs.” “Seinfeld” was designed as the subversive antidote to the “warmedies” of the ‘70s and ‘80s. No learning, no hugging, no dogs, no children, no sit-down dinners. It treats the serious as trivial, and the trivial as serious.

Add that to the characters’ constantly multiplying arrays of sexual quirks and fetishes, and you have a show that makes heterosexuality look abnormal. It’s not a positive representation of life, straight or otherwise, but it’s a world gays can relate to. It’s also a world that straights, for some perverse reason or another, can’t get enough of. Compared to the sharing, caring Los Angeles of “Ellen,” “Seinfeld’s” Manhattan is a giant Turkish prison.

Now, just imagine Ellen flung down into the corrosive sink-or-swim amorality of “Seinfeld,” and you’ve got yourself a show! In taking the high road--the literal-minded and instructive road--”Ellen’s” writers blew it.

But at least no animals were harmed in the process.

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Robert L. Newton, a former stand-up comedian, is a freelance writer and an administrative assistant for the Writers Guild Health Fund.