This story originally ran in the baiduhai on May 25, 2011.
By most standards of reason, people who don’t love cashmere sweater sets and books about childhood sexual abuse shouldn’t miss Oprah Winfrey after her daily talk show ends its run Wednesday. But, in just one measure of the influence she has had, I think we will.
Her TV show may not have been for us, and I say that not just because we’re mad about never being given a car. Her magazine, oozing new-age spirituality like other magazines shed subscription cards, was not for everyone. Even the novels picked for her Book Club were a collection of good literature that was a little too focused on being about one “issue” or another.
She made logic circuits overheat by pushing on her followers such snake oil as “medical intuitive” Carolyn Myss or “The Secret.” You remember “The Secret”: Just think thoughts of success, and you will be successful. And yet the only person “The Secret” can be proved to have worked for is the (Oprah-blessed) author of “The Secret.”
It’s not as if Winfrey has won us over with some charm offensive, either. In a decade of covering television at the Tribune during Oprah’s glory years, I talked to Winfrey just once. For other Chicagoans, she’s been barely visible in the last decade or so, popping up to take over Michigan Avenue for a few days, but mostly existing in the celebrity bubble. Long gone are the days when, as she once said, “I would stop at Dunkin’ Donuts in the morning, myself, pick up the doughnuts for the audience.”
Nonetheless, imagining daytime TV without her is like picturing the PGA Tour without Tiger Woods. Actually, we’re seeing that now, and it ain’t pretty.
When the One True Superstar departs, everything else, instead of rising up and filling in the available space, seems diminished by comparison. And you notice the absence. Whatever Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Oz or, it is rumored, Katie Couric or Anderson Cooper manage to do in daytime TV next season, their accomplishment will be diminished because they didn’t do it against Oprah.
Just now, I was trying to think of another Oprah comparison: Who was that person who took herself out of the running for big awards to let others have a chance? And then I realized: It wasn’t something like Tom Hanks and the Academy Awards. The situation I was trying to think of was Oprah and the Daytime Emmys, which she did in 1999. Even when you’re looking for things that are like Oprah, you are thinking of Oprah.
Winfrey has become a profound mover of books, magazines and moisturizers, of course, but mostly she has moved the emotions of her audiences.
“For multiplying her expanding brand across multiple platforms, she is in a class by herself,” said Jason Maloni, chair of the sports and entertainment practice at Levick Strategic Communications in Washington. “It’s a tremendous confluence of the right person at the right time, and it’s been phenomenal to watch.”
And, Maloni adds: “On any list of the 10 biggest moments in daytime TV, she’s going to occupy the first nine spots, and the 10th is going to be that Aryan Nation guy who threw a chair at Geraldo.”
The psychological aspects of her influence stem, in part, from her extraordinary staying power. She had 25 years in national daytime television, suffering minor setbacks, yes, but never the boom-and-bust cycle that is, for others in American media culture, standard. She’s finally leaving her perch at the top not the way Woods did, due to scandal and injury, but voluntarily, to run her eponymous and perhaps quixotic cable network.
But she also has a hold on people’s minds because she runs her show not unlike a TV ministry.
“Oprah espouses a prosperity gospel familiar to many students of evangelicalism,” says Kathryn Lofton, assistant professor of American studies and religious studies at Yale University and author of the new “Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon.”
“Her makeovers are familiar rituals of transformation like those you might find in an evangelical revival. Her Book Club has some similarities to a Bible study, etc.,” Lofton adds in the email interview.
Winfrey has affected the culture and reflected it, Lofton says. “After Oprah, first-person narratives have become indispensable products. After Oprah, all purchases seem to hold transforming possibility. After Oprah, celebrity seems more powerful than statesmen or politicians. This is not to say Oprah is responsible for these changes. It is, simply and powerfully, that she is representative of an era.”
The religious aspects of the show may not be immediately apparent to her fans, but the strong connection is. “I watch ‘Oprah’ all the time,” says Jessie Conners of Minneapolis, the owner and founder of Peppermint Park, a Web-based designer-fashion discount club. “She has, like, a rags-to-riches story. That’s kind of me, as well: I don’t have college education; I lived in an orphanage in Mexico for a while. It’s motivational.”
More than just a fan, Conners has been an “Oprah” guest — along with fellow first-season contestants on “The Apprentice” — and a beneficiary of Oprah’s prosperity gospel. Peppermint Park was recommended in February’s edition of O, The Oprah Magazine. “Sales increased something like 3,000-plus percent just from that one little mention,” Conners says. “We have seen a steady growth since then, which is phenomenal.”
The sales impact of a Winfrey endorsement has been so widely chronicled, it has a name, the Oprah Effect.
But the biggest Oprah Effect outside of Harpo Studios itself has been in bookstores. Begun in 1996, a decade after she started in syndication, Winfrey’s on-air Book Club quickly painted her as the savior of contemporary fiction.
A planned printing of 90,000 copies, very healthy for fiction, might jump to eight times that after a Winfrey endorsement. In the early years of her Book Club, the smallest run for any chosen book was 650,000 copies, and the biggest, Wally Lamb’s “She’s Come Undone,” went to 3 million, says Cecilia Konchar Farr, professor of English and women’s studies at St. Catherine University in Minneapolis-St. Paul and author of 2004’s “Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads.”
Farr says also she came away from her study impressed by Winfrey’s educational impact.
“She would engage the audience in reading that was deep and interesting and as good as anything I do in literature classes,” Farr says. “She took reading seriously and took her readers seriously enough to challenge them.”
That changed in Phase 2 of Oprah’s Book Club, when it returned to the air after the dust-up early last decade with Jonathan Franzen over issues including whether his “The Corrections” would be published with the “O” logo on the cover, signifying it was a Book Club choice.
“Since 2002 she hasn’t invested nearly as much in the Book Club,” Farr says. Though book discussion used to fill a full hour, “lately it gets 15 or 20 minutes at the end of the shows. And now they do sort of celebrity endorsements.”
Winfrey, though, used the Book Club, plus her two-years’-prior repudiation of daytime tabloid TV, to really build her brand and influence.
“She starts the move into mega,” says Janice Peck, author of “The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era.” “She made a conscious effort at what she calls makeovers, to position herself as distinct from the rest of them.”
Corporate America took note of her ability to access the gold-mine demographic of women while running a clean brand. She took her website off of AOL and out on its own, where it draws some 720,000 daily visitors; she partnered with Hearst to launch O Magazine in 2000.
And she brought daytime TV toward her. The new shows these days are her own, do-gooding spinoffs starring people she’s mentored: medicine with Dr. Oz, relationships with Dr. Phil. Or they are frothy, celebrity-filled chat hours, like DeGeneres’ show. The old-line tabloid warriors still hold on, but they haven’t had much new company in recent years.
Through the 2000s, “she’s no longer just a talk show host,” says Peck, a University of Colorado professor. “In the trade press, the ways her enterprise is talked about, they ran out of superlatives.”
Though many give Winfrey credit for the audacity of launching an old-fashioned cable network in an era when viewing is shifting to the Internet, Peck also wonders what it will mean for her influence: “In the business model that is Harpo, the content is her. At one point she says, ‘(Longtime beau) Stedman (Graham) told me never give up the show because the show is the mother lode. The entire universe turns on it.’ I still wonder what happens when the show is gone.”
For those of us who watched all of this from a safe distance, we will miss it. Maybe not in the way some people will miss Oprah: as a friend, an influencer, a mentor, even, to a degree, a pastor. But her absence will be undeniable, like the empty block where a big building used to stand.
And if any of us wanted to find even a shadow of that former impact again, we would first have to figure out whether our cable system carries Winfrey’s new channel and then what number it actually appears on. That’s not influence so much as homework.
Big screen or home stream, takeout or dine-in, Tribune writers are here to steer you toward your next great experience. Sign up for your free weekly Eat. Watch. Do. newsletter here.