Ellen DeGeneres had planned on partnering with HBO to make a show called “Little Ellen” that would be targeted at a preschool audience and has been skewered by many critics as “woke”. In fact, she did so for two seasons of the show, with plans for it to run for at least four seasons.
But, things didn’t work out, with HBO’s owner, Warner Bros Discovery, purging the library and lineup of nonsense that no one wants to watch in an attempt to cut costs.
And so “Little Ellen” was cut, with the show being entirely canceled and those twenty episodes of it that have already been created being put on ice indefinitely.
The show, which ran for two seasons, ran on HBO Max and was about the life of a young Ellen Degeneres. It’s now gone entirely.
The show’s creator, Jennifer Skelly, had to find out in the news that the show she was creating would be shelved indefintely and scrubbed from the HBO Max lineup.
Speaking on the show’s cancellation, Skelly said:
“It’s really devastating. I’ve worked on a million things that have never seen the light of day, but it’s pretty rare that you get this far down the pipe, it’s literally done, and it’s still not going to see the light of day.”
Continuing, Skelly went on to talk about the nature of streaming services and connect that to what happened to the woke show she was creating with Ellen, saying:
“In the streaming culture, I don’t know everything about how that process is done. But to me, it seems like, ‘Well you’ve got them. Just flip a switch. They’re done and they’re delivered.’ But obviously, there’s so much corporate stuff going on in terms of what that means for them financially.”
Skelly then talked about how hard the situation was for staff and directors, saying that the way the Warner Bros Discovery team went about canceling the show and scrubbing it entirely would make it hard for people to know how to protect themselves when working with the company moving forward. In her words:
“There were writers who had their first episodes in that back 20, and there were directors who got their first shot at directing. We had a lot of firsts on our crew, and they won’t get to see those episodes on TV and see their credit. It’s really tough.”
“I don’t think people are going to avoid working with that studio or even necessarily be able to know what to ask for in the contract to protect themselves, because the parameters in a year-and-a-half are going to be different again.”
But the show evidently wasn’t worth keeping around on HBO Max, so it was scrubbed entirely. Speaking about why it might have been so unpopular that that happened, Skelly said:
“We were a perfect storm of many things because the Ellen brand has also suffered in the last few years.
“Our show wasn’t going to be getting a ton of love anyway for that reason. We started out at the high point of her career, but by the time it was animated — because it takes forever to get something done in animation — her brand was in a really different place, and her show was ending.”
And now it’s gone and there is one less bit of propaganda for the wokies to foist on young kids.
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