Joely Fisher Recalls Bomb Threats on Ellen Set When Ellen DeGeneres Came Out: ‘It Was Very, Very Dark’

Joely Fisher is looking back on the iconic “coming out episode” of Ellen DeGeneres’s ’90s sitcom Ellen — as well as some of the scarier moments that came after.

On the most recent episode of the Still Here Hollywood podcast, Fisher, who costarred in the show as Ellen’s best friend Paige Clark, noted that “The Puppy Episode,” which also coincided with DeGeneres’s own public coming out, marked the first time the lead character of a U.S. network sitcom had come out as gay or lesbian.

“It was so important,” Fisher told host Steve Kmetko. “You know, we all knew that Ellen was gay.”

Fisher explained that prior to the two-part 1997 episode, Ellen’s writers had tried to make the show “palatable for the world to watch this female comedian.” But there was still speculation about whether DeGeneres and her character would come out as a lesbian.

“I remember very, very distinctly, and she went to a meeting. And she came back, and her face was red, and I knew that she had been emotional,” Fisher, 57, recalled. “And she’s like, ‘We’re gonna do it.’ And she said she felt like she was a bird let out of a cage, and I could see it in her gait and in her everything, in her essence. And I knew that it was gonna be something that was important.”

During a 2017 taping of her daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the episode, DeGeneres explained that its title, “The Puppy Episode,” wasn’t just meant to keep its storyline under wraps; it was also an inside joke among the show’s cast and crew.

“When the writers told the executives that they wanted me to come out because my character needed to be in a relationship after four years of not being in a relationship,” she explained, “Someone at the studio said, ‘Well, get her a puppy, she’s not coming out.’ So, we called it ‘The Puppy Episode.’ ”

According to Fisher, the puppy comment came during a meeting DeGeneres had with Mike Ovitz and Michael Eisner, then president and CEO, respectively, of ABC parent company Disney.

“They were like, ‘Can’t she just get a puppy?’ ” Fisher recalled. “So, we would joke all along, the whole season: ‘Here’s where Ellen’s gonna get the puppy.’ ”

“The Puppy Episode” was greeted with both enthusiasm and controversy even before it aired in March 1997. After news that DeGeneres’s character would come out during the show’s fourth season leaked, the studio received at least one bomb threat, a fact Fisher said she’d forgotten about until she reunited with the Ellen cast on the 2017 episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

“I had forgotten the bomb threats and the dog sweeping the studio every tape night, where we would all clear the stage, and they would make sure that someone wasn’t going to bomb us,” she told Kmetko. “It was very, very dark.”

“I remember being at [DeGeneres’s] house, and she was involved with Anne Heche still at the time, and there was press outside the door. And I was, like, calling [husband Christopher Duddy], and I was like, ‘I think I’m gonna stay over because it seems a little dangerous over here.’ And she was hysterical, and [saying] ‘My career’s over.’ And then we all know what happened. It wasn’t really over.”

While “The Puppy Episode” earned the show its highest-ever ratings and won both Emmy and Peabody Awards, ABC canceled Ellen after its fifth season. Fisher admitted that season 5 “got soapbox-y and unfunny.”

“It sort of became something that America didn’t wanna see,” she added.

Of course, DeGeneres went on to have an even more successful second act hosting her talk show from 2003 to 2022, when it ended amid accusations that the host oversaw a toxic work environment.