Ellen DeGeneres' final show features Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Aniston, the first guest to appear on Ellen DeGeneres' daytime talk show in 2003, will bookend the series' 19-season run when she returns as the guest on the May 26 finale.

The producers announced Tuesday that "Friends" and "The Morning Show" star Aniston, who has appeared on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" roughly two-dozen times as a guest or guest host, will be the featured guest in the finale. Also appearing will be pop star Pink — whose song "Today's the Day" has been the show's theme since 2015, winning a 2016 Creative Arts Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding promotional announcement — and fellow music star Billie Eilish.
Stand-up comic and sitcom star DeGeneres — who has won four Daytime Emmy Awards for outstanding talk show host, in addition to her syndicated series' 11 for outstanding talk show and successor category outstanding entertainment talk show — announced in May 2021 that the upcoming 19th season would be her last. This March, she gave a finale date on social media, writing "My final episode airs on May 26. I'm going to miss this."

Neither DeGeneres nor Aniston has commented publicly on the new announcement. The host, 64, had tweeted on April 28 that production for the finale had already taken place.

The series, which has aired more than 3,300 episodes and won 64 Daytime Emmy Awards overall, according to the announcement, premiered Sept. 8, 2003, at NBC Studios in Los Angeles. Beginning with the 2008-09 season, it has shot at Warner Bros. Studios' Stage 1, which the studio dedicated to DeGeneres on Nov. 12, 2015, in celebration of her 2000th episode.

This past March, the show's representatives announced that the roster of guests leading up to the finale would include former first lady Michelle Obama, tennis champion Serena Williams and entertainers Jennifer Garner, David Letterman, Adam Levine, Gwen Stefani, Channing Tatum and others.