Next season will be the last for the Ellen DeGeneres Show. She’s calling it a day.

Ellen will end with 19 seasons, one short of a big 20. But they can’t make it and they know it. This season “Ellen” has been crippled by low ratings and bad press.

So DeGeneres will get a victory lap season, and then move on to new ventures. The signal was that she put her Beverly Hills mansion up for sale some time ago. She was bragging about staying at a house owned by Courteney Cox and commuting home to her estate two hours north of LA in Montecito.

DeGeneres has been plagued by scandal from last summer when it was revealed that her show’s backstage atmosphere was “toxic.” Employees were complaining and the subject of complaints. She seemed clueless while the show sank in the ratings. Guests and celebrities complained as well of poor treatment.

In the end, three producers were let go. But from September when the show returned, the ratings dropped like a rock. She’s down to 900,000 viewers per show per week. More than half the audience is long gone and not coming back.

Unclear what happens to her “Game of Games” show on NBC Primetime, also dying in the ratings, also produced by her. My guess is it’s gone.

The news of Ellen’s ending was first reported in The Hollywood Reporter.

Beats me. I thought Anderson Cooper was a good Jeopardy host.

But Cooper’s second week was a disaster, sending the ratings below 5 million for the first time in recorded history. The total was 4.8 million, down severely from Ken Jennings’ 6 million earlier this winter.

For a first run, non repeat “Jeopardy!” show, the number is cataclysmic.

The Cooper fail dragged “Wheel of Fortune,” its companion show, down to 4.8 million also.

Syndicator CBS has wrapped the season, so there’s nothing that they can do to remedy the situation. Instead of just putting Jennings in, they had to make this mess of things with the guest hosts. Week by week the ratings have just slid down with no reprieve. Crazy.

At this rate, by the time they finish up the season the show will be in dire straits. They will have to run the best of Alex Trebek all through August and highlight Jennings’ old wins before naming him permanent host.

Ironic, isn’t it? Jennings was the only non-celebrity to guest host besides EP Mike Richards, and he got the best ratings.

First, here’s the film, followed by the explanation:

The Gaze from Barry Jenkins on Vimeo.

This 50 minute film is from Barry Jenkins, director of “Moonlight.” He posted it to Twitter today in advance of his series “The Underground Railroad” coming to Amazon Prime on May 14th. The music is by Nicholas Britell, one of our great modern movie composers.

The series is based on the award winning, bestselling novel by Colson Whitehead. The miniseries stars Thuso Mbedu, Chase W. Dillon and Joel Edgerton. Aaron Pierre, William Jackson Harper, Sheila Atim, Amber Gray, Peter De Jersey, Chukwudi Iwuji, Damon Herriman, Lily Rabe, Irone Singleton, Mychal-Bella Bowman, Marcus “MJ” Gladney, Jr., Will Poulter and Peter Mullan round out the cast.

Barry Jenkins serves as showrunner and directs all ten episodes of the limited series.

Here’s Barry’s explanation. Just gorgeous, and great PR:

In my years of doing interviews and roundtables and Q&A’s for the various films we’ve made, there is one question that recurs. No matter the length of the piece or the tone of the room, eventually, inevitably, I am asked about the white gaze. It wasn’t until a very particular interview regarding The Underground Railroad that the blindspot inherent in that questioning became clear to me: never, in all my years of working or questioning, had I been set upon about the Black gaze; or the gaze distilled.

I don’t remember when we began making the piece you see here. Which is not and should not be considered an episode of The Underground Railroad. It exists apart from that, outside it. Early in production, there was a moment where I looked across the set and what I saw settled me: our background actors, in working with folks like Ms. Wendy and Mr. and Mrs. King – styled and dressed and made up by Caroline, by Lawrence and Donni – I looked across the set and realized I was looking at my ancestors, a group of people whose images have been largely lost to the historical record. Without thinking, we paused production on The Underground Railroad and instead harnessed our tools to capture portraits of… them.

What flows here is non-narrative. There is no story told. Throughout production, we halted our filming many times for moments like these. Moments where… standing in the spaces our ancestors stood, we had the feeling of seeing them, truly seeing them and thus, we sought to capture and share that seeing with you. The artist Kerry James Marshall has a series of paintings of ancestors for whom there is no visual record but for whom he has supplied a visual representation of their person. For me, most inspirationally, “Scipio Moorehead, Portrait of Himself, 1776.”

Of the painting, from the Met Breuer exhibit KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: MASTRY – “In this painting Marshall created an imagined self-portrait of a real African American artist, Scipio Moorhead, who was active in the 1770s. Few if any images of Moorhead exist in the historical record. Everything we know of his legacy is based on Phillis Wheatley’s first book of poetry, published in 1773 while she was a slave [sic] in Boston. The book’s title page illustration is an engraving of the writer, reportedly modeled on a painting by Moorhead. The engraving remains the only visual proof, however tenuous, of Moorhead’s existence.”

In the way that Mr. Marshall sought to honor Mr. Moorhead through this imagined physical representation of the artist, we have sought to give embodiment to the souls of our ancestors frozen in the tactful but inadequate descriptor “enslaved,” a phrase that speaks only to what was done to them, not to who they were nor what they did. My ancestors – midwives and blacksmiths, agrarians and healers; builders and spiritualists, yearn’ers and doers – seen here as embodied by this wonderful cast of principal and background actors, did so very much.

Housekeeping: From end to end what you are hearing here is Nick’s original score. And yet even at fifty minutes, this is barely twenty percent of the score for the show. The same with the images; maybe five of these shots are in the actual show? There are no spoilers here. Other images in this format appear there but not here. All told, we archived four hours of these portraits. They flow in story order, from Georgia to Indiana. NOTE: one of these things, you’ll notice, is not like the others. In the context of the show, its presence will make sense.

A FEW SHOUTOUTS – None of these shots are planned. Occasionally, when the spirit moved us, we stopped making the planned thing and focused on making THIS thing. So shoutout to my brother James for sure; we had a show to film and yet he never questioned, he brought his best to this. Always. Caroline Eseline. Our costume designer. The majority of the souls you see here are inhabited by background actors. Which meant at any moment, the camera could go from a close-up of number one on the call sheet to… a portrait of number 500. It did not matter. Every soul needed full embodiment. And every damn time I saw someone and was moved to portraiture, there was no doubt of their readiness. The same goes for Lawrence Davis and his wonderful group of hair stylists. And Doniella Davy and her makeup team. Liz Tan, Spoon, Jesse and the directing team. Alex Bickel. Daniel Morfesis, who cut this and all the teasers that came before. OUR BACKGROUND ACTORS. My most humble thanks.

This is an act of seeing. Of seeing them. And maybe, in a soft-headed way, of opening a portal where THEY may see US, the benefactors of their efforts, of the lives they LIVED.

Much love to you. And so much love to THEM.

-B

HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” broke the million mark Sunday night, posting 1.049,000 linear viewers on the main channel at 10pm. That’s up over a million viewers from episode 2.

It’s obvious that was word spreads, viewers are catching up. Plus, the show was spoofed hilariously on “Saturday Night Live.”

Episode 3 slowed the pace a bit but introduced a lot of new ideas and characters. There was also a big reveal and plot twist at the end of the hour that no one was expecting.

Here’s my two cents: I think the Evan Peters character, Colin, is the son of the Guy Pearce character, Richard. One of them is the abductor/killer. Colin’s mother would be Richard’s ex-wife. Richard talked about them in Episode 2. So we had to meet the mom this past week and see Colin with her.

At first I thought the killer was Richard. But Colin is super creepy. He hit on Mare, then asked her out. Very inappropriate.

Katie’s mom, who has cancer, gives me very Laura Palmer’s mother vibes from “Twin Peaks.”

Whatever happens, Kate Winslet and co. should easily have a new mystery for a second season. She’s spectacular, Jean Smart and Julianne Nicholson are wonderful, and let’s hope there are more twists and turns.

“Lupin” is coming back on June 11th! Hallelujah! The French thriller TV show is a sensation on Netflix. Omar Sy stars. This show had better get a lot of Emmy nominations this summer. So clever and fun. And we’re learning French in the process!

Sacre bleu!

PS I have no idea why this trailer keeps coming and going.