What is this “syndication” that made such a big difference?
I guess explaining syndication would enlighten me of the fears she was expressing there, which I am not able to evaluate.
“Syndication” basically refers to the rights to a TV show being sold separately from a broadcast network. For example, first run episodes of “NCIS” are only shown on CBS affiliate stations. Reruns of that same show might be sold to a CBS affiliate in NYC , an independent station in Houston and an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles to be shown. Each station determines the day and time for itself . There’s also first run syndication , often used for talk shows, courtroom shows and sometimes sitcoms - that’s the sort of syndication that applied to Oprah’s show.
I don’t think the ABC stations were going to syndicate the show- I think they were going to buy the rights, produce it and sell it to affiliates - some of which are owned by the network.
She’s the covergirl on every issue of her magazine. That’s some grade A self-regard.
I watched Oprah every day after school in the 90s. Her public persona is a warm, fun and friendly one, and she dealt as deftly with issues like sexual assault as she did with celebrity interviews. She was always intensely honest about her vulnerabilities, too – her shame about her weight, her experiences of abuse – which resonated with a lot of women. I can think of worse things I could have been watching as a nine or ten year old kid. It was a nice stand-in for actual parents, sort of a Mr. Rogers for the older set. I don’t agree with everything she’s done, but she was hugely influential on me as a child.
It’s also easy to forget that all this was pre-internet. And waay pre-social media.
Once she started to get a little bit popular, women needed to watch her show to know what to talk about at lunch. Much as the men “had” to watch the NFL game on Sunday to know the main social conversation topics for Monday.
TV shows back then were much more in a winner-take-all competition with each other. She won; she took all. She didn’t need to be much more meritful than her peer shows, but just a little was enough to snowball into quite a lot.
One of the things she did not do was have a major celebrity meltdown. No assaulting policemen, no anti-Semitic tirades, no 4 trips through some celebrity dryout / detox hospital, etc. With all the concomitant bad business decision-making that goes with doing stupid shit like that.
When hard work + Fate hand you 4 aces, a lot of people stumble on the way to playing that hand for all it’s worth. She failed to stumble. Given Oprah’s age, I doubt she will.
Or it might merely be wise promotion. Presumably the magazine was profitable for a long time. If not showing Oprah’s face would have increased readership and ad revenue then the strategy of ‘Always Oprah’s Face’ would have been ‘Grade A self-regard.’
Since most magazine don’t have the success of Ms. Winfrey’s, I’m going to consider the cover strategy to be “Smart”.
Exactly. She’s a talk show host who helped mainstream a lot of quack medicine and gave a megaphone to the anti-vax movement.
A neighbor’s kid won a car on The Price Is Right, but after figuring out the expenses and taxes, they had to turn it down. I think, though, they got some smaller financial prize instead.
When people say that she grew up from “relatively humble beginnings” that is downplaying things a lot.
Her mother was an unwed teenaged black woman in Mississippi in the mid 50s who worked as a housekeeper. Her father was a coal miner who was in the military at her birth. Her parents never wed.
By the way, she was named Orpah at birth, named after a figure in the Book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible. People kept mispronouncing her name, so she just went with it and embraced “Oprah”.
After Oprah was born, her mother moved north to live with her grandmother in rural poverty. She literally wore dresses made from old potato sacks. Her grandmother took her to church and taught her to read before she was 3.
Her mother then took her to an inner city neighborhood in Milwaukee when she was 6, and gave birth to Oprah’s first half-sister. Oprah was sent to live with her dad in Nashville for a while, and her mom had a 3rd daughter who she gave up for adoption (and Oprah didn’t know about her until 2010). Oprah moved back to live with her mom again, and her mom then had a son, Oprah’s half-brother.
Oprah reportedly suffered years of sexual abuse and ran away from home at age 13. She became pregnant at 14 but the child was born prematurely and died.
She went to high school in Milwaukee, and due to being incredibly smart was given an opportunity to go to an affluent high school through the Upward Bound program. However, she did not fit in, as she was an extremely poor African American girl going to school with a bunch of very rich white kids. She started to steal to try to buy clothes to allow her to resemble her peers and got in trouble. Her mom sent her back to Nashville again to live with her dad. Her dad was strict but was focused on making sure that Oprah was successful in school, and with his encouragement she became an honors student.
She worked as a teenager at a grocery store, then won a beauty pageant at the age of 17 and got the attention of a local Black radio station, which hired her part time. She worked there as a senior in high school and her first two years of college. She earned a full scholarship to Tennessee State University where she studied communication.
After that, she worked news television in Nashville before moving to Chicago to take over a failing local daytime talk show. She was very successful, and that show went national and became the show she was famous for.
Anyone was says she’s “famous for being famous” is being very dismissive of where she came from and what she went through to get there. She’s an objectively brilliant person who has a talent for communication and entertainment. Personally, I am not the biggest fan of her show or most of her work (though I’ve enjoyed her acting), not because I have anything against her (aside from the times she has given a platform to quacks, as others have pointed out) but because I’ve never been in the demographic that she appeals to. However, I am a massive fan of her as a human being. I admire her the way I might admire some country music stars despite the fact that I loathe country music. I can appreciate what someone has accomplished without being a consumer of what they’ve created.
I recall reading that game shows often would prefer that winners take the cash value instead of the actual car or RV or dining room furniture.
Kathleen Madigan has this to say about Oprah. O Magazine is the relevant bit. It starts at :54 but the irrelevant bit is funny too.
oprah and Martha Stewart were/are what every influencer on social media uses as a template …
But in the mid-80s Oprah appeared at the right time because all the old afternoon entertainment shows were gone and the racier shows like Jenny Jones ect (they appeared because orpah became popular)were a few years away and a lot of stations had nothing on in the afternoons after the soaps ended and the evening news began except Phil Donahue’s show
Also, she was “exotic” for 80s TV a single African American inner city SJW type who was using her show as a voice for social concerns in fact when I was 11 years old the first show of hers I watched was about a Chicago charity for unwed teen mothers that needed funding and some of the auidence was less than receptive to the cause …
From Married with Children:
Peg: Oprah says that’s the first sign of mental illness.
Al: No Peg, watching Oprah is the first sign of mental illness.
She made an important stop after Nashville that I remember quite well: WJZ-TV Channel 13 in Baltimore, a Westinghouse station at the time. I lived within range and saw her quite frequently. She was hired to co-anchor Channel 13’s number-one rated news with a crusty old white-haired guy (Jerry Turner) who was the dean of Baltimore TV. She was a young, Black woman and he resented her and treated her with utter contempt, on and off the air. Eventually, management decided her talents would be better used co-hosting a mid-morning talk show (“People Are Talking”) with the much kindlier Richard Sher. It was probably the decision that changed her life. They made a good team and her star rose quickly after that, eventually leading her to WLS-TV in Chicago.
Named for Sears.
But it was at WGN (named for the Trib). I did my internship at WGN720 at about the time she started in TV. Siskel and Ebert worked out of the same drab concrete block off Addison St. as well. Oh, and Bozo too.
Thank you for that insight. The truth is rarely pure and never simple, right? I see that she generates strong feelings. I did not expect this thread to elicit so many responses, thanks a lot to the other respondents too!
There’s a reason why she is brought up in serious suggestions for someone to run for POTUS. It’s not a “checks all the diversity” boxes as some have suggested, but rather that she has a life experience that many disenfranchised and powerless people can relate to. And she’s also extremely smart and charismatic.
Would she be a very good POTUS or doing any other elected position? I have no idea. I don’t think we’ll ever know because she has no interest in it.
Oh, was it WGN? I assumed it was WLS because ABC was mentioned, and WLS AM/FM/TV were ABC O&Os at the time. Either way, she made a big leap from Baltimore and it paid off for her spectacularly.
Yeah, I think people give her a pass for some real harm she has done in the world.
She did? I don’t recall that. I’m not saying that you’re wrong, but I don’t remember that message.
I’m not at all a part of her target demographic (being a white, cisgender male), but I was always a fan. I’ve appreciated her positive attitude, and she strikes me as a genuine person - certainly not perfect, but I believe that she tries to do good.
Incidentally, one of her signature accomplishments was the opening of a girls’ school in Africa.