Talk:The Puppy Episode

The Puppy Episode has been listed as one of the Media and drama good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
November 23, 2008	Peer review	Reviewed
December 20, 2008	Good article nominee	Listed
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 24, 2008. The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that when ABC's Birmingham, Alabama, affiliate WBMA-LP refused to air the Ellen coming out episode "The Puppy Episode", a local LGBT group sold out a 5,000-seat theatre so people could watch it via satellite?
A fact from this article was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on April 30, 2022.
Current status: Good article

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Comedy Mid‑importance

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Chaz Bono[edit]

According to modern conventions, transgender individuals should be referenced using their preferred name and pronouns. Chaz has stated that he identified as Chaz for a very long time, but did not publically come out until late. Glad Tips for Referring to Trans Individuals points to Lilly Wachowski's coming out, but includes a lot of clear guidelines on referring to trans individuals in the past. I have followed those naming conventions in adjusting the reception part of the main article. 24.154.177.144 (talk) 08:09, 18 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Viewership numbers[edit]

The actual viewership of this episode is a little hard to pin down, and I'm not sure the currently-used figure of 42 million accurately reflects the number of people who watched.

Newspapers of the time report ABC initially estimated 20 million (The News Tribune, Tacoma Washington, May 1 1997, page A3), followed by 42 million (Cincinnati Enquirer, May 2 1997, page E2). Knight-Ridder reported 36.2 million viewers (Philadelphia Enquirer, May 2 1997, page A9) while another report estimates 26.7 million viewers based on a 26.5 rating (The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield Massachusetts, May 2 1997, page c6).

Another article clarifies that ABC's 42 million figure reflects people who had watched "a portion" of the episode (The Daily Advertiser, Lafayette Louisiana, May 6 1997, page B1) and the episode itself reached 36.1 million viewers.

It's possible that ABC's claim of 42 million may include people who watched a 20/20 special about the coming-out episode the week before, which had 13.8 million viewers based on a 14.2 rating (San Francisco Examiner, April 30 1997, page b3). That math almost works if you choose your numbers very selectively: 26.7 plus 13.8 gets us 40.5, and perhaps ABC is adding another 1.5 million from other miscellaneous sources. That's just a guess on my part.

At any rate ... from reporting of the time, it seems unlikely that 42 million people viewed the episode live at the time of broadcast. For this article, I think more accurate wording would be something like:

"The Puppy Episode" was the highest-rated episode ever of Ellen, with ABC estimating 42 million viewers watched some portion of it. Mattymatt (talk) 19:59, 9 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]