American graffiti

1 Ellen DeGeneres made her television exit last week, but with relatively little fanfare. A year after scoring headlines with its groundbreaking "coming out" episode, her sitcom Ellen was last month cancelled by its network ABC. DeGeneres responded by publicly denouncing network executives (she told Entertainment Weekly recently: "I was fired basically because I'm gay."). In a television interview earlier this month, the president of ABC did little to disprove DeGeneres's claim, offering unbelievably obtuse complaints like "the character was gay every single week". Still, discrimination aside, the final, excruciatingly unfunny episode of Ellen suggests that the cancellation may be best viewed as an act of mercy killing.

1 Ellen DeGeneres's girlfriend Anne Heche stars this summer in Ivan Reitman's Six Days, Seven Nights, a romantic comedy in which she ends up marooned on a tropical island with Harrison Ford. Word has it that the studio, Disney, which cast Heche just before she and DeGeneres went public with their relationship, has decided to market the film as "an adventure", not a romance. In fact, it's been suggested that Disney - which, incidentally, owns ABC - may be having some fun at Heche's expense with the film's trailer. In one scene, Ford and Heche are wading in a river when she yells, "Some sort of creature just swum up my pants!" Ford reaches underwater to retrieve it, at which point a voiceover kicks in: "This summer, find adventure in the most remote place known to man."

1 The 169th and final episode of Seinfeld was also aired last week, bringing to an end a national preoccupation that had recently intensified to alarming proportions (a sociologist in the New York Times referred to it as "the Seinfeld-industrial complex"). An estimated 75 million viewers tuned in to the hour-plus finale on Thursday. Without giving anything away, I can report that the concluding episode, scripted by the show's creator Larry David, actually lived up to expectations, against all odds. Thursday nights will never be the same - Seinfeld's most likely replacement is the irritating, aptly titled Just Shoot Me. The country now turns to its next designated pop-cultural phenomenon: Godzilla, which opens this Wednesday on a record 7,363 screens.