How Oprah Became the Queen of Television
When Chris Rock joked, “Look at the most powerful person in the world – and President Obama is sitting next to her!” at the December 2010 Kennedy Center Honors, there was as much truth as there was humor. But on Wednesday, May 25th, after 25 years as the platinum standard of afternoon talk, Oprah Winfrey said a fond farewell, as she transitions all of her considerable energies on her OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) cable service, and her adventures in feature films and Broadway.
Few if any performers in history had the kind of impact that the Queen of Daytime has had on society, politics, and culture both high and low. Walter Cronkite may have once been “the most trusted man in America”, but Oprah was perhaps the most trusted woman and so much more. Her appeal came not from sitting at the top of the proscenium, high-handedly telling people “the way it is”. To her multi-millions of fans across America and Canada, she was a best girlfriend, a soul sister, the mother or next-door neighbor we wish we had. Despite her almost inconceivable wealth and power, she remains someone we can wave and call out at on the street and know she’ll cheer us back.
Oprah took TV talk beyond the superficial and often insulting “girl talk” and gossip of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and the often B-list celebrities’ grazing ground of the ‘70s. After Phil Donahue and then Oprah walked out into their studio audiences with a portable mike, they turned the camera and the all-seeing eye of the audience in on itself. But while Phil Donahue provoked controversy and often told his audience what to think, Oprah took the big-sister approach, “hugging it out” with her heroes and heroines, sternly lecturing her villains like a strict but loving mom or teacher, feeling their pain, sharing their sorrow, and celebrating their triumphs.
With a few notable (and high-quality) exceptions, like Rosie O’Donnell in the late ‘90s and Ellen today, what one notable reference book once dismissed as the “couchbound showbiz prattle” of previous daytime talk pioneers like Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore, became a thing of the polyester past. Before, people might have wanted to know about a special struggle or secret here and a heartwarming triumph there from our favorite TV and recording and once-great movie faces, in between the jokes and recipes and trying out the double-entendres they’d use next week on Match Game and Hollywood Squares. Afterwards, we wanted to see ourselves reflected back at us, instead of the fantasies and escapism. And we demanded to go deeper with our celebrities, to crack the greasepaint phoniness of showbiz code (“Back again today, that popular favorite and my very dear personal friend, a great humanitarian and entertainer, I want a warm welcome for Miss Lola Heatherton!!!”)
When business buzzwords like “branding” and “multi-media platforms” were barely in the lexicon, Oprah was already pioneering the concept. Already she was a legitimate feature film star (an Oscar nod for The Color Purple), a credentialed journalist and news reporter in Chicago. Soon she branched out to movie and Broadway producing, and made herself the biggest “national librarian” in the book biz, with Oprah’s Book Club. After Bill Clinton rebooted political campaigning with his multi-media exercise in media hipness, hanging out with Arsenio, MTV, and SNL, Oprah became the queen of political kingmaking. Both Clintons, George W. Bush, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, and all the rest dropped by Harpo Studios.
Though this approach was arguably more interesting and instructive than before, it also cemented what our own David Frum called the “Let’s talk about ME” culture of insta-catharsis, where airing one’s dirty laundry became a point of pride rather than a shameful secret. In many ways, Oprah was the Internet before the internet, doing more to democratize our discourse than anyone before Mark Zuckerberg and YouTube.
Oprah also rebooted the biography and memoir and the celebrity interview into self-help and empowerment life coaching by another name. It is hardly an insult or racist to point out that this technique came specifically from the black church, and from Oprah’s own roots as a pioneering black feminist and career woman. Forget dry ice novels about rich people suffering existential crises or glitzy, pseudo-royal biographies of life in the cloistered halls of political power. We want (as one legendary singer actually put in her recent memoirs) bullet-points with useful life lessons we can adapt for ourselves. Oprah would be the first to admit that someone with a last name like Kennedy or Rockefeller was important – and she’d be first in line behind Barbara Walters to “get” them for The Interview. But she was the one who also insisted that perhaps their Latina housekeeper or black butler had just as, if not even more, “important” a life and story.
In this case, imitation proved to be the insincere-est form of flattery. By the tabloidy 1990s, Geraldo, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake, and Jenny Jones were the worst offenders, taking Oprah’s format and brand and crassly downsizing it into white (and all other colors) trash’s ill-est meltdowns and moments. But Oprah’s worst TV trauma, and the biggest potential damage to her carefully crafted “brand”, was yet to come.
One can almost feel the panic attack, one that not even the most powerful woman in the world” had the power to overcome, when James Frey was outed in early 2006 after having been featured and billboarded on her show. Little wonder that of all the AAA-list celebrities and greatest “gets”, it is perhaps his episode that is the most (in)famous in the show’s history. Like the notorious quiz show scandals of the 1950s, would this revelation of a fake, a breach of trust on this level – even though Oprah herself had been innocent of the deception – cast a pall over all of the legitimate heroes and survivors and their stories that she’d featured? Would their real-life stories be reduced to eye-rolling camp, with viewers watching say, some single-mother break down in tears, and instead of identifying with her plight or feeling sorry for her, just roll their eyes a la Mrs. Krabappel from The Simpsons, cynically thinking, “She’s faking it.”
Oprah was prepared for the sleaze merchants and tabloids doing their dreary thing. But what not even she was ready for was the Network- or The Player-level uber-cynicism of our modern media-industrial complex. This was when the curtain parted, when we saw where the roads led when “anyone” could be a star, provided their Queen-for-a-Day sob story was sizzly enough, when leading lights like Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, Bristol Palin, and Snooki all have blingy deals for “booki-s” simply because they have sexy secrets and brand names that will “pre-sell and move units” (as we say in the book biz.) This was when Oprah was placed in the same kind of dilemma she’d featured with other people in the hot seat for the past 20 years. Would she give up and give in, or would she battle back to re-emerge triumphant?
Of course, in true Oprah fashion, we all know which road she chose. (She even ‘made up’ with Frey, and featured him on her last week of shows.) From buzz-machine moments like Tom Cruise’s sofa-jumping antics to helping pick the next President of the United States, the “Queen of Daytime” never let anyone else take away her crown.
And that is why, in this year when more daytime TV institutions are failing than banks in September of 2008 – Regis, Mary Hart, and Larry King joining Oprah in semi-retirement, All My Children and One Life to Live reaching the end of their lives – the end of The Oprah Winfrey Show as we know it cannot be ignored. The fact that anyone, let alone an African-American woman of her time and place, could overcome the obstacles Oprah did to quite literally conquer the world, is the most remarkable story of all presented on her show. And this week, in Oprah's own uplifting-ending style, she bid farewell with the love of her fans still undiminished, and her head held high.