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Three years after her controversial ABC sitcom left the airwaves, comedian Ellen DeGeneres is back on another network. In The Ellen Show, the eponymous star plays an attractive gay woman named Ellen Richmond. When her once-thriving dot.com company goes belly-up, Ellen skedaddles from New York and returns to her Norman Rockwell-style home town, moving in with her eternally judgmental mother Dot (Cloris Leachman) and her unlucky-in-love sister Catherine (Emily Rutherfurd). After a brief period of unemployment, Ellen goes to work as a guidance counselor at her former high school, under the aegis of her old principal Mr. Munn (Martin Mull). Here she works side by side with her one-time prom date Rusty (Jim Gaffigan), who still has a crush on her, notwithstanding Ellen's radically altered lifestyle. Originally packaged by Mike Ovitz's ATG Productions, Ellen was taken over by CBS when the Ovitz enterprise died on the vine. Slated to be shown on Fridays, the series finally debuted on Monday, September 24, 2001, where it failed to make a dent in the ratings despite the strong lead-in from Everybody Loves Raymond .