LOS ANGELES — When Ellen DeGeneres launched her daytime talk show, it felt like a flag planted on lunar terrain.
Six years earlier, the comedian and her sitcom character had come out, in tandem, in what remains the single most well-known moment in the history of queer television. But as one learns in Steven Capsuto's indispensable book "Alternate Channels" and "Visible: Out on Television," the extraordinary Apple TV+ docuseries it inspired, that interest soon waned.
As the news cycle moved on, ABC, which aired "Ellen," grew uncomfortable with its handling of the character's coming-out process, which it depicted in sympathetic, radical-for-its-time detail. Almost exactly one year after its namesake appeared on the cover of Time, the series was unceremoniously canceled.
