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So, we’ve had this farewell season of Oprah Winfrey. That was fun, wasn’t it? Except she isn’t exactly going anywhere. Only in America do you get a big party when you are not actually leaving. She’s only changing channels and she has stopped doing the daily hour program that had so many Americans, and people around the world, enraptured.
The occasion of her parting from that daily syndicated show has opened flood gates of commentary about her impact on America, individual lives and television. She has been credited with saving people, helping many go to college, building a school in South Africa, selling a massive amount of books and, in general, helping people, especially women, realize that whatever struggles in life they face, they aren’t in it alone. Why? Because Oprah is out there, struggling herself and doing oh so well.
Having started working in television as a news anchor at a very young age, I have my own pet theories about why Oprah has been so successful. One is this: she dropped the phony part of being on television. By now, 25 years after she started, she has developed her own TeeVee schnick, but she was one of the first people ever on American television to stop acting like she was on television. She was not talking to “everyone”, she was talking to one person in her living room, paying rapt attention.
Television was filled in its earliest days with former Vaudeville performers, people who could arrive in a small town and fill up a stage with stunts, gags and chatter for an hour or more and have the audience leave laughing, forgetting all about the fact that they had paid hard earned money to see the show. What worked on stages was over the top, silly, exaggerated stuff that made tipsy vacationers in the Catskills laugh. Regional comedy from New York went national.
The second wave of people on television, after Vaudeville acts, were still drawn from show business experience. Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and others had all been comedians, singers, minor league actors and such. Some of them failed on the stage but hit it big on television. They were still putting on show, it just happened to be sitting down before a mic, interviewing people and sometimes putting on funny skits.
Television followed radio in developing ways of acting when the red camera light went on. It was a show, a presentation, one that required vocal skills and pose and a constantly moving pace. By spending most of her time interviewing people, Oprah was able to drop that and try to be herself. Something new. While the interview subject droned on, she was able to loosen up and inject her personality into the mix. As the appeal of that personality and personal approach became apparent, she went with it and the rest is television legend.
People act phony on television for some of the same reasons they do at parties: they are afraid of letting others see them as they really are. They want to be slightly more : impressive, funnier, more intelligent, better.
Having developed a less than authentic self to present to a television audience, most people on television keep acting the same way. Off camera, they might be perfectly genuine people, even mean or annoying, but on camera, the world lights up for them. In time, they usually lose the ability to see what is real and what is phony in themselves and they became “tv people”, suited to no other line of work or life. Show business takes over.
Most before Oprah never thought they could be much better, and more successful, by being themselves. If they had come across the idea, the bosses in television would have shut it down. Oprah was the product of syndication, not network television, and as part owner of her own show based in Chicago, she was allowed to develop without 40 eager beaver young network hotshots trying to tell her what to do.
In the name of protecting “the product” it takes only a few producers to ruin the talents and accomplishments of the very best in the business. Over management, trying to figure out and control creativity, saps it of its strength. That’s one reason everyone wants to run when “the suits” arrive to issue instructions. Since most of the producers sent to mind a show by a network don’t have talent themselves, they don’t even have an idea what they are destroying. Oprah Winfrey would not have happened on a network, ever.
At some point in the last 25 years, Oprah realized that the most impressive thing she could be was herself. Her life story of near poverty, hardship and struggle became part of the show. The viewers could say, “Oh, look, she’s had so many things go wrong in her life, look at her now! She’s like me: imperfect, but proud and, just as I would like to be, she’s successful.” The idea that white Americans could closely identify with the problems faced by an African-American was something that hadn’t been tried before on television, as well. Perhaps people felt bigger because they could see the world through the eyes of a race that had been shunned.
One other key factor is that the show was on every day. Had it been on once a week, or a couple of times a week, it never would have reached the heights it did. In short, it wouldn’t have really mattered. Being on every day meant that the audience could weave the program into their lives. It was always there, like a friend, waiting. So, less than 24 hours after someone’s husband told her he wanted a divorce, there was Oprah with a program about how to survive divorce and be a better, more successful, happy person. What a deal.
In my own case, I had to learn to sound “like people on the radio” (professional) to get my first jobs. To become much better, however, I had to unlearn those lessons and learn to communicate on a more personal level. I found the home for that sort of communication at NPR in the early days and it was quite an enjoyable experience.
Other commentaries of talked about Oprah as a kind of national spiritual leader. I was not, by any stretch, a regular watcher, so I can’t really give decent comment on that subject, except in one aspect: almost all major, popular “stars” embrace spiritual notions in their careers and lives, which gives many people a greater sense of participation and access to the person behind the star image. The idea of being on a journey, searching for answers and meaning if life is enormously appealing to many people, again, especially to women.
There is a whole sub-genre of books dedicated to this “spiritual search’ idea, even if that search takes place largely in bedrooms and other less decorous places. What we would all like is some sense of fulfillment and the idea that we aren’t wasting our lives. Oprah, somehow, gave the audience the feeling that it just might be true, that life is not completely filled with disappointments and disillusionment from the moment the senior prom is over until you die. To me, she deserved almost all of the success that came her way and, in the main, did not detract from our national life, making some contributions of caring along the way. Her championing of books, alone, sets her far apart from anyone else in American television over the recent decades.
Doug Terry, 5.26.11
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