“For Your Approval,” the new comedy special starring Ellen DeGeneres , begins with a kind of run-through of DeGeneres’ long career. We open with a shot of DeGeneres in her dressing room, smiling wistfully as she looks into the mirror and sees, overlaying herself, a projected memory of her first appearance on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”; she smiles slightly at the recollection, then gets up to walk down the hallway toward the stage, seeing in monitors, as she walks past, clips from her 1990s sitcom, including her character’s (and her own) coming out as a lesbian. She walks up a staircase with each individual rung emblazoned with a headline about that sitcom’s 1998 cancellation and hears voices like Barbara Walters’ and Diane Sawyer’s describing the controversy; breathing a heavy sigh as she reaches the top of the staircase, 2024 DeGeneres breaks into a brave smile as Dory, her “Finding Nemo” character projected behind her, instructs her to “Just keep swimming.
” It’s a spectacle of ego that seems at odds with the humble, just-folks demeanor DeGeneres shows on stage — but then, that divide has lately been part of the whole Ellen experience. As the package goes on to chronicle first the seismic success of her talk show, which launched in 2003 (just five years after her sitcom was canceled) and then the painful swirl of reporting around the workplace culture at the “Ellen” talk show before it went off-air in 2022, there’s a discomfiting fee.