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Ellen

Writers: Ellen DeGeneres (story); Mark Driscoll, Dava Savel, Tracy Newman, Jonathan Stark (teleplay)

Original Air Date: April 30, 1997

What’s It About: Ellen Morgan (Ellen DeGeneres) realizes, at long last, that she’s probably not really into having sex with men. The epiphany comes after an old college friend, Richard (Steven Eckholdt) hits on her; she turns him down, and questions why, exactly, she’s not interested in him, as he seems objectively like the perfect guy. Ellen seems to hit it off, however, with Richard’s colleague, Susan (Laura Dern), who admits to Ellen that she’s a lesbian and assumed that Ellen was gay, too. Freaked out, Ellen rushes back to Richard and attempts to have sex with him, but, again, is ultimately not into it. After discussing the situation with her therapist (Oprah Winfrey), she comes to understand that the one person she has “clicked” with in a long time is Susan. She rushes to the airport as Richard and Susan plan to leave town, and she tells Susan (and the rest of the airport, after inadvertently speaking into a microphone) that she’s gay.

Why It’s So Good: Ellen often blurred the lines between reality and fantasy (such a thing happens when a show’s title and protagonist share the same name as the series’ famous star), which is what made Ellen such a terrific series in the first place: DeGeneres’ own awkward and neurotic sensibilities seamlessly transitioned from her stand-up onto the show, and while Ellen Morgan owns a book store rather than telling jokes for a living, it was often difficult to figure out where exactly reality stopped and the fictional Ellen took over.

Ellen DeGeneres publicly revealed she was a lesbian with a Time magazine cover story, which hit newsstands on April 14, 1997. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise: when the fourth season of Ellen began, DeGeneres and her producers began negotiating with DIsney, ABC’s parent company, on how to bring Ellen Morgan out of the closet. “The Puppy Episode” (the title being an inside joke after network executives suggested that a major plot point for the season involve Ellen adopting a puppy) went into production a month before it aired. It was already sparking controversy, with the studio receiving at least one bomb threat, a stranger following DeGeneres onto the set, and advertisers pulling their ads from the broadcast.

But what’s so important about “The Puppy Episode,” and in particular the first half of the episode, is that it really was a groundbreaking half-hour of TV that brought visibility to the LGBT community. It’s hard to believe just 17 years later how controversial the episode was considering how more representation of queer people (and positive representations, at that) are seen on current TV. (That Modern Family, which features a married gay couple with an adopted child less than two decades after Ellen caused such a ruckus, is one of the most popular network sitcoms is no small feat.) Watching the episode and its finally scene in which Ellen says to the world, “I’m gay,” still holds a lot of power less than twenty years later. The episode as a whole beautifully blends the typical awkward humor Ellen was known for as well as the poignantly sweet personal drama that the character must deal with insider her own head.

The Best Moment: In the show’s first scene, Ellen’s friends and coworkers sit around the bookstore as she’s getting ready for her date with Richard. As they share their amazement that she’s going on a date in the first place, they all express their annoyance that she’s taking so long to get ready. “When are you going to come out already?!” they shout, adding some meta commentary about the media’s obsession with DeGeneres’ coming out.