The American dream has never had a better spokesperson than Oprah Winfrey. She is Oprah, hear her roar.
“I see myself as a messenger for a message that is greater than myself,” said an almost scarily beatific Winfrey at the winter TV critics’ tour this week. “And the message is: You can. You can. You can do, and you can be, and you can grow, and it can get better.”
Was Oprah actually glowing as she said it? It seemed so.
The daytime talk diva paid a royal visit to the TV tour Thursday afternoon to boost the Oprah Winfrey Network, which launched on New Year’s Day in the United States and hits Canada full-force March 1.
Fielding only a handful of questions in an hour-long session – one of her answers was 23 minutes, 15 seconds long – Oprah looked smart in a purple blouse, magenta sweater and brown slacks. She sweetly suggested journalists stand up while speaking (“That’s what we do,” she noted, “on the Oprah show.”) She talked about growing up dirt-poor in Attala County, Miss., and about how her grandmother told her that TV was “devil’s work.”
And more than once, Oprah explained the bold move of starting her own cable channel: “My life pattern has been that whenever I have outgrown a circumstance or a situation, I move on, regardless of whether I know what the future holds.”
In the final moments of her visit, one brave journalist asked Winfrey whether she thought Anderson Cooper, who has signed on to host a new syndicated series starting next fall – in the time slot Winfrey will be vacating – has what it takes to be the next Oprah.
“The next Oprah?” she said, feigning imperiousness. “No. The next Anderson, yes. That would be like someone having said to me, ‘Are you going to be the next Phil Donahue?’ No, I wasn’t. I created my own way of doing it.”
And with that, she was gone.
Beyond a new TV empire ascending, Winfrey is currently in a victory lap for The Oprah Winfrey Show. It wraps next September – which could prove to be either a game changer for the talk-show genre, or something more akin to game over.
Marilyn Denis sees an opportunity for herself on Canadian television. — The Globe and Mail
Unlikely as it sounds now, almost nobody had heard of Oprah when her show kicked off in 1986. The most-watched daytime talk fest back then was The Phil Donahue Show, which tapped into viewers’ prurient tastes with sensational confessions from guests and ain’t-it-weird theme episodes.
Its ratings spawned more talk, and more true confessions, hosted by the likes of Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer and Canadian-bred Jenny Jones. Quickly labelled trash TV, the genre hit a low ebb in 1995 when a guest on Jenny Jones was soon after murdered by a fellow guest on whom he had acknowledged, on-air, having a same-sex crush.
Oprah, meanwhile, opted for the high road.
Hers was a more inspirational form of TV confessional: Just as human as any of her viewers, she shared her own struggles with weight, sex abuse and other travails from her past. She focused on people’s problems, but also offered solutions, either from a personal perspective or by making new stars. (Hello, Dr. Phil).
Miracle of miracles, Oprah was able to draw intimate details out of famous people, too. As Michael Jackson worked to rebuild his public image in 1993, he went on Oprah. Ellen DeGeneres came out on Oprah’s show in 1997. And when Tom Cruise wanted to tell the world how much he loved Katie Holmes in 2005, he did it by jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch.
More momentously, Oprah got TV viewers to read. Her book club became so influential that when gossip queen Kitty Kelley was shopping around her unauthorized bio of Oprah, several publishers took a pass. “It’s like we live in a monarchy,” she told The Globe and Mail last year, referring to Oprah’s influence.
Curiously, as Oprah’s power has steadily expanded – some credit her official support for Barack Obama with sealing the deal for him at the 2008 Democratic convention – her TV ratings have steadily tapered off. Ratings for her final season are averaging 6.7-million viewers in the U.S., and roughly a half-million in Canada. Those are healthy numbers, and ahead of most daytime shows, but a far cry from a decade ago.
