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Ellen DeGeneres lights a cigarette. (Not that she smokes much, she says, but she’s been talking about “her,” and she smokes when she talks about her. Her is Anne Heche). Smoking and talking about Anne Heche are not two activities with which DeGeneres is eager to be associated publicly, but this is the way it is: You meet DeGeneres, ostensibly to chat about her new situation comedy, and there is still this elephant in the room.

The room, in this case, is the living room of DeGeneres’ home, the modern home that she formerly shared with Heche, the home that she says she’s planning to sell. She wants a bigger space. She needs “to be behind a wall,” though not necessarily gates. New beginnings seem to be a DeGeneres specialty, accessibility perennially a two-edged sword. The Ojai ranch to which she and Heche fled Hollywood three years ago has been sold off, the Los Angeles home purged of “her.”

“Everyone walks in and says it feels different,” DeGeneres says of the house. “It feels calmer, it has a good energy, and I’ve made it my own. But I still think it would be nice to let the last piece of that go.”

She will call later and ask that the home’s location not be published. Similarly, DeGeneres’ relationship with actress Alexandra Hedison “will be kept private,” she says. “I won’t try to hide it, but it just won’t be the same kind of thing, obviously.”

DeGeneres in person is vulnerable and open, but she is also a celebrity starring in a long-running gossip story that still, evidently, has legs. Promoting her new CBS situation comedy, “The Ellen Show,” has also meant months of hedging her comments about Heche, who has been on a tour of her own lately, promoting an autobiography, “Call Me Crazy,” in which she casts herself as the survivor of childhood sexual abuse and multiple personalities who is now happily married to a man, Coleman Laffoon, a cameraman Heche met last summer on DeGeneres’ stand-up comedy tour. The feng shui of Heche’s life includes a deal at Warner Bros. to star in a television series. (CBS, apparently out of deference to DeGeneres, declined to take a pitch meeting with her.)

DeGeneres says she won’t read Heche’s book: “I don’t really care,” she says, “because her truth is her truth.... I would also like to get to the point that I’m not referenced in everything she does.”

As she talks, two cats slink around the living room--one a rescue cat from Ojai that had been “torn apart by coyotes,” DeGeneres says. It is easy to see how she might identify.

In “The Ellen Show,” DeGeneres plays a failed dot-com entrepreneur who moves home and becomes a guidance counselor at her old high school. It’s a quaint way of saying you can be as confused about what to do with your life at 40 as you are at 14. Home is Clark, an Anytown, USA, of daft characters and sincere intentions, where ignorance and tolerance are an equal kind of bliss. From the pilot we learn that Ellen has recently broken up with a girlfriend--she is openly gay but mostly on a need-to-know basis. “The Ellen Show,” after all, airs at 8 p.m., the family hour.

Nobody thinks a sitcom is a bad idea for DeGeneres, particularly a DeGeneres who, at 43, seems to have reached an accommodation with her audience and herself--one she lacked in 1997, when she came out as a lesbian on her ABC sitcom “Ellen,” resulting in advertiser panic, network backtracking, a media frenzy and, perhaps most lethally, a comedian puffed up with defiance.

Amazingly, she was still funny, beneath it all. Then as now, DeGeneres’ comedy--the sly asides, the ironic distance mixed with empathy--makes her ideal for a medium in which the jokes and situations tend to play with all the subtlety of a birthday gorilla-gram. Unlike others who get this chance, DeGeneres seems built for the pingpong rhythm of a situation comedy. It has to do with the cadence of her comedy, her ability to communicate compassion. There remains only the small matter of surrounding her with the right cocktail of characters and situation.

That said, “The Ellen Show” is one of the few new network comedies that doesn’t seem undercooked or, worse, controlled by a star whose willingness to do television is met with the gratitude of supplicants before a visiting pope. The Stars Who Are Willing to Do Television arrive every season, filled with entitlement and blind commitment money. This year, for instance, there is Jim Belushi, who sat before the press in July at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena, where television reporters from around the country annually gather to meet the stars of new series.

Belushi has a new sitcom on ABC called “According to Jim,” in which he plays a family man, but he addressed the press in a more believable role--that of a recognizable name whom the network was trotting out in a tired format in the hope that the name (Belushi equals funny!) would attract viewers. Belushi, for his part, chomped gum through his half-hearted comments. By the end of the session, you felt bad that you had taken up so much of his time.

Yet, because of its placement on the schedule (Wednesday nights at 8:30, following “My Wife and Kids,” a promising comedy with Damon Wayans), “According to Jim” is arguably a safer bet to stay on the air than “The Ellen Show.” After premiering Monday night in a special time period at 9:30, “The Ellen Show” will air at 8 on Friday nights, the least-watched night of network programming at a time, as Mediaweek pointed out recently, that CBS hasn’t launched a successful comedy in 46 years. The low-profile time slot was a corporate decision (Monday night is CBS’ big night of comedy, with “Becker,” the 4-year-old sitcom starring Ted Danson, its most movable part. But “Becker,” which follows the 9 p.m. hit “Everybody Loves Raymond,” is being readied for a syndication sale after the upcoming season and is produced by Paramount, which, like CBS, is owned by Viacom).

The Friday time period has left DeGeneres and others close to the show mouthing that network cliche: If you make it funny, people will show up. Wendy Goldstein, senior vice president of comedy development at CBS, argues that the network’s two new Friday-night series, “The Ellen Show” and “Danny” (a comedy starring Daniel Stern), will benefit from the popularity of “Survivor” on Thursday nights.

“Using ‘Survivor’ as a platform completely changes the story about Friday,” she says. “We just haven’t had that Thursday-night launch pad before.”

But if “The Ellen Show” does well, it will likely be rewarded with a move to a new night--not unlike the strategy CBS employed last season when the drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” became a sleeper hit on Friday nights and was promptly moved to Thursdays, where it could draw more viewers and drive up advertiser rates.

In the short term, “The Ellen Show” at least needs to fare well with critics on a night when DeGeneres’ urban fan base isn’t apt to be sitting on the couch. Phil Rosenthal, executive producer and co-creator of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” experienced this when his show was launched on Friday nights at 8:30 in 1996.

“[CBS] hadn’t had a hit in that specific time slot since ‘Gomer Pyle,”’ Rosenthal says. “We certainly didn’t change that. All that was expected of us was to go up a little from ‘Dave’s World’s’ audience, which wasn’t very good either.” That January, newly installed CBS Entertainment chief Leslie Moonves gave “Raymond” a six-week tryout on Monday nights, where it has since become the network’s highest-rated comedy.

“If the network likes the show and the critics like the show, they will help sustain you,” Rosenthal says. “But if you’re on Friday and no one likes you and you’re doing lousy, there’s no hope for you.”

DeGeneres can only worry about this stuff so much, just as she and her creative team (co-creators and executive producers Mitchell Hurwitz and Carol Leifer) have had to roll with another distraction--the collapse of Artists Television Group, the Michael Ovitz-financed studio producing “The Ellen Show” with CBS. Several weeks ago, ATG, having accrued prohibitive debt and unable to find a corporate partner, shut down, leaving unclear who would underwrite “The Ellen Show,” with its estimated cost of $1 million an episode. CBS has since assumed full ownership of the series--a corporate move that may help, since the network now has an even more vested interest in seeing the show succeed.

On the new Fox comedy “The Bernie Mac Show,” star Bernie Mac stares at the camera, spouting philosophies about parenting. On the new NBC sitcom “Inside Schwartz,” a single guy’s romantic life is commented upon by sports stars and referees.

“The Ellen Show” is a multi-camera comedy, taped before an audience and sweetened with a laugh track. In other words, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before--and before and before. Days after a CBS party poolside at the Ritz-Carlton, Leifer complained that several reporters dismissed the pilot episode as been-there-done-that television, further perceiving a sugarcoating of DeGeneres’ sexual orientation.

“People feel the show is soft,” Leifer said. “But I mean, the point with Ellen was really not to push the envelope. She was coming off of a big envelope show.”

“First, I get criticized for being too political, now it’s too soft. It’s pretty ironic,” DeGeneres says later.

The notion that sitcoms need a radical structural make-over gets refuted every time a conventional-looking one becomes a hit. Like “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “The Ellen Show” writers feel they’ve found a formula in which small stories can yield classic comic moments through good writing and a great cast, which includes three seasoned pros--Martin Mull, Cloris Leachman and Jim Gaffigan, seen in last season’s CBS comedy “Welcome to New York.”

Her sitcom family, as DeGeneres sees it, is traditional-modern: a divorced mom (Leachman) with two daughters, one straight (Emily Rutherfurd) and one gay. Because DeGeneres is the gay one, the question inevitably becomes: How gay? Will she date? Have on-screen kisses? What beverages will she drink and why?

“I’ve worked with a lot of straight actors, and we certainly didn’t talk about sexuality a fraction of the amount that you do with a star like Ellen,” Leifer says. “Especially with the sexuality in the show, I’m already learning you’re never going to please everybody. Why isn’t she dating? Why isn’t she making out with someone? Everybody has an issue about something.”

For now, DeGeneres’ sexuality will play out in stories like this one: Ellen is invited out for a drink with the lesbian gym teacher, only to be picked up in the afternoon because the nearest gay bar is 125 miles away.

The last time DeGeneres’ character was gay, of course, she was gay writ large--a distinction thrust upon her as part of the coming out of her character, Ellen Morgan, on “Ellen,” and the companion coming out of DeGeneres herself. One season later, “Ellen” was done, amid a ratings drop-off and the general sentiment that DeGeneres’ political symbol-hood had overwhelmed her show, onstage and off. By the end, DeGeneres was barely on speaking terms with ABC executives, whom she felt abandoned the show because its star had become a political hot potato.

“What I was doing was kind of letting go of the funny a little bit and becoming more about the issues,” she says. “That’s why it was always so weird to me that I became controversial. I’m so not controversial, there are so many more people who are controversial. But you just don’t see it.... The networks deal with it, and the agents. And I feel like I’m so easy to get along with, but I just was fighting for something that was really important to me. And it turned out that I seemed like a troublemaker.”

And yet, the coming out of Ellen Morgan gave “Ellen” a focus it had always lacked. Originally called “These Friends of Mine,” “Ellen” was born as an urban, female-centered comedy at a time when “Seinfeld” knockoffs were at the top of every network’s to-do list. But even with a star of DeGeneres’ talent, the show seemed rudderless, reflected by the fact that “Ellen” changed executive producers nearly every season it was on the air, as DeGeneres and her writers continually flailed at a creative direction for her character.

“You almost could watch, every season it was a different show,” DeGeneres says now. “It wasn’t clear. Ellen didn’t date, Ellen wasn’t looking for the right guy. It was just her kind of living with friends and we were just trying to make the situations funny every week ... but it was never clearly defined.”

When “Ellen” died, DeGeneres died a little with it. By then, she and Heche were outspoken cause celebres , stoking both the public’s support and its cynicism. In a 1998 interview with The Times after DeGeneres’ show was canceled, the pair blasted Hollywood’s hypocrisy toward their union and announced that they were heading to Ojai. “‘We were nave”’ the headline proclaimed.

Despite this naivete, Heche managed to keep the messengers busy delivering deal memos. But DeGeneres, lacking an established feature film career, worked more sparingly. She now refers to this time as her “introspective” period.

“I think everybody probably felt the same thing that my managers were telling me, which is, ‘Just relax. Everybody wants a little time to pass because you’re a little scary for everybody right now,’ which felt weird,” DeGeneres says. “Like, you know, just relax and they’ll forget about it. And that felt weird too. Like, I don’t want them to forget about it. Now I understand what they were saying, but at the time I was fighting for my cause. And it’s like, ‘But this is me, this isn’t political.”’

DeGeneres the exiled was not a role she relished. She did a few supporting roles in movies (“The Love Letter,” “Goodbye Lover”). But what was a workaholic comic to do in Ojai? Chat up folks at the corner grocery and keep the snakes off the front porch?

It was during this time that Rick Yorn, a powerful Hollywood agent, left Creative Artists Agency to join Ovitz in his new enterprise, Artists Management Group, and its ancillary TV studio, Artists Television Group. Ovitz, the pitch went, would cater to big stars in a particularly doting and discriminating way. DeGeneres hooked up with Yorn through her lawyer, signed with AMG and soon found herself developing a variety show for CBS through ATG.

For her return to prime time, DeGeneres wanted to resurrect “The Carol Burnett Show,” complete with weekly sketches and Ellen-on-the-street interviews. Around this time, she was writing a new hour of stand-up material--a three-month process that became the basis of a comedy tour and HBO special, filmed last summer in New York, called “Ellen DeGeneres: The Beginning.”

The stand-up grounded her in “the funny” again. She did jokes about the absurdity of 1-800 numbers on shampoo bottles and why physicist Stephen Hawking probably shouldn’t talk during sex. She didn’t rant about the controversy that had suffocated her, she expressed her journey through interpretive dance. It was yet another coming out--as a writer and comedian, the person she had been all along, only not.

In the meantime, DeGeneres shot the variety show pilot, only to decide the project was too ambitious. “It was around the time of the breakup [with Heche] that she changed her mind,” says Hurwitz, who had worked with DeGeneres on “Ellen” and was developing the variety series with her. “My personal feeling was relief. I didn’t know how to write variety.”

Leifer was brought in, pitching a show in which DeGeneres moved back to her hometown after a major life change. The concept seemed to fit the tumult of the comedian’s life. It only remains to be seen whether audiences will embrace her as implicitly as the residents of Clark welcome her home.

“Would people be this tolerant?” DeGeneres replies when asked if she’s made her sitcom world too idyllic. “I don’t know. Would there really be an apartment in New York City that the cast of ‘Friends’ could live in?” *

“The Ellen Show” premieres Monday at 9:30 p.m. on CBS, then moves to its regular time slot of Friday at 8 p.m. The network has rated it TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children).