September 25, 1997
A Kiss Is Still a Kiss for Ellen

Ellen DeGeneres, who last week won an Emmy for comedy writing for the coming-out episode of her eponymous ABC sitcom, says she is facing an uphill battle this season. "I'm really excited that we're doing something nobody is doing, but it is a fight," she says in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. One fight that the actress-comedian says she recently had was over an on-screen kiss her character shares with another woman. It seems the kiss, combined with a certain line of dialogue (a joke DeGeneres didn't want to reveal to the paper), created problems with the censors. "It's literally a two-second kiss," she tells the paper. "It's two women kissing on the lips--but it's a two-second kiss. First of all, it's been done before. I'm not breaking any new ground--there have been kisses on television. And, it's just so nothing. It was so offensive to me that they're saying you can't show that." But sources tell the paper that the kiss will make it onto the tube when the show airs in October.

Still, DeGeneres says she's getting frustrated: "I have to appreciate how supportive [ABC] has been in doing it in the first place--but that was my fear of coming back and having to fight these battles every week." She hinted last May that she would not have been unhappy about folding the series after her character, Ellen Morgan, came out as a lesbian. "I don't know how much further we can go with this show, and twenty-five episodes is a lot to try to do all these compromises and still make it funny and creative and about something totally unique," she says. "If we have to keep going back to the middle, then we're not doing anything different at all." Things should stray from the center at least a little this season--actress Lisa Darr is joining the cast for at least four episodes as Ellen's--you guessed it--girlfriend. Ellen's season premiere is Wednesday night.

 



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