What seemed like the genuine prospect of a loss for daytime TV turned this week into the 4,367th savvy Oprah publicity moment. The talk show monarch announced in her first program of the season that she would continue to serve her public (and her bankers) through the last year of the millennium.
This reaffirmation of the status quo became big news nationwide, thus assuring that the 1997-98 TV season began with everybody talking not about the live “ER” episode or the emotive talents of Jenny McCarthy but about Oprah Winfrey and a show that’s entering its 12th year.
Winfrey let it be known there were no beans to spill in a special live edition of her program Monday. With eyes wide in professed innocence she made light sport of all the speculation this summer over her employment status, showing video clips of TV reporters who knew from inside sources that she was going to exercise a contractual option and fold up the tent come next May.
The implication was that the TV folk–and print ones did it too–were idiots or lying. But it is entirely possible that someone inside the Winfrey camp did tell those people that she would call it quits. It is even possible that Winfrey, who runs a notoriously tight ship, or her publicists, orchestrated a faux leak or two, the better to maximize the publicity value of her deciding to stay.
It is also possible–and I don’t know enough about her contract to know whether it is probable, or even logical–that this was brinksmanship, as in something done to wring a few extra Brinks trucks full of cash out of her syndicator, King World, whose stock fluttered about all summer on the basis of the latest Winfrey gossip.
Whatever it may look like now, the speculation was not entirely unfounded. Back in March rumors were floating through city media circles that her staffers had been told it would be wise to freshen their resumes. Winfrey, herself, allowed, on Monday’s live show that she had gone into her summer break thinking she might put a cork in it after this season.
The news that the most dominant personality in the history of daytime TV will, after all, be around for two extra years past this one throws the wrench of stability into a world that had looked ready for some chaos.
With no Oprah to kick everybody else around, would the showtune’s best pal Rosie O’Donnell have risen to the top? Would Jenny Jones have suddenly stopped offering fat strippers, as on Wednesday’s show, and attempted to take Winfrey’s comparatively high-minded mantle? Might Jerry Springer have shed his skin-crawling cynicism and put the brain we all know he possesses to better use than (barely) refereeing trailer-park donnybrooks?
And what about the other Rosie, Roseanne? Do people really want to hear her talk every day, as she, a major producer and a whole lot of local TV stations are banking on? Would her chances have been improved with a daytime void where Winfrey used to be?
We will never know. Some of us, to whom “daytime television” is another way of saying “insipid” (due to perkiness) or just plain “inaccessible” (due to work), don’t much care. But millions do: Not even counting the undernoticed novelists hoping to land on Oprah’s Book Club, 15 million every day, in season, worship in the cult of Oprah and other millions follow, albeit with more skepticism and less fervor, the freak shows of Jenny and Jerry.
The decision by Winfrey puts all those questions into dull relief. They are now interesting mostly to the specific show hosts and advertisers who can’t afford “Oprah.”
Despite the periodic appearance of “Winfrey is in ratings trouble” stories, she is not, and there is no reason to believe she will become so in the next three seasons. From September, 1996 through this September, a period which includes summer reruns, her show drew an average 7.8 rating, or nearly 7.8 million households a day. The year before it was a 7.6, the year before that an 8.0.
She inches down. She inches up. But she does not step off the top rung of the ladder or let anyone else near. Her closest competitor for the most recent year was O’Donnell at a 4.5; the year before, Jenny Jones at a 4.1.
Winfrey does not enjoy the double-digit ratings she used to, but nobody has made a serious run at her.
And Winfrey, meanwhile, has stuck by her public avowal that she would stop wallowing in muck, which can only keep her future rosy. The show has turned into a hybrid of celebrity promotional slop (another kind of wallowing, but at least one that’s not exploitative), women’s magazine and charity outlet.
The urge to do upbeat shows and the new celebrity imperative can lead to some odd moments, as when, for a stretch last spring, she turned the show into a Tina Turner promotional vehicle. A more discomfiting show saw a woman whose ex-husband had shot her children to death come on “Oprah” to be rewarded with a trip to Europe. And Winfrey, who is producing six TV movies for ABC and producing and starring in a big-screen version of Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved,” can seem a little detached from the program at times, as if she’s forgotten to turn on her considerable charm.
But mostly “The Oprah Winfrey Show” is still an exceptionally well produced hour, with a host of unrivaled magnetism and a depth and quality of guests that makes her show’s efforts look like “60 Minutes” compared to her competitors’ “Dateline NBC.”
