What Oprah Taught Us

During my sophomore year of college, my roommate and I chose our classes based on an unnegotiable criterion: We had to be home in time to watch The Oprah Winfrey Show. That year, we sat in the living room of our dorm watching Oprah rip James Frey a new one, wiping our tears during the heartbreaking six-month updates from Hurricane Katrina survivors, and wondering what was going on with “the kids” in her special on American schools. Later, when my roommate learned how to make apple martinis, we had something to elevate our viewings. We felt like true adults.

We weren’t alone in organizing our days around Oprah. By then, The Oprah Winfrey Show had become a shared cultural experience, something people made time to watch every weekday. Over 25 seasons, Winfrey steadily expanded the boundaries of what daytime television, and the people watching it, could talk about: abuse, grief, racism, mental illness, books, bras. (Everybody learned you’re supposed to measure from underneath, not the center. Thanks, Oprah!) She moved effortlessly between the devastating and the delightfully mundane, and millions followed. And though her recommendations could send books up best-seller lists and products off shelves, Winfrey says the show’s deeper influence was found in quieter moments. The true impact, she believes, was in the viewer who came to understand that alcoholism was a disease, the viewer who went back to school, the viewer who decided to live another day, and many more.

40 years after The Oprah Winfrey Show made its national debut, Winfrey discussed the conversations she believed helped give people language for experiences they previously couldn’t name and what today’s media inherited from the world she helped create.

You gave people remarkable expectations for what could happen on an ordinary day. You made them think they could turn on the TV at 4 p.m. and get a car. Did you understand the influence you had at the time?
Certainly by the 2000s, I understood that it was a vehicle for being a force in people’s lives to show them the best of themselves, even when you were hearing stories that demonstrated the worst in other people. As for the impact — and this isn’t bragging, this is just what I know to be true: Everywhere I go in the world, there isn’t a place where somebody hasn’t told me that they watched, were moved, were stirred to do something differently in their life. They made a change, they went back to school, they divorced somebody, they were able to speak of their abuse. I know that it has impacted people.

What do you consider the show’s legacy?
I remember early on, like in the first year, I was in a grocery store, and a woman came up to me and said, “I’ve been watching your show, and I have to tell you, I didn’t believe you when you said you shouldn’t hit your kids. Well, I decided to try that for a week. It’s been three months now, and I’m a different mother.” So what is my legacy? My legacy is in those kids whose mothers stop hitting them. That sort of thing happened a thousand times — multiple thousands of times.

I always think your show was one of the architects of what we know as “going viral.” What do you think of the shows and podcasts that have taken your format and approach and are having a lot of success with it today?
It’s fantastic because the medium evolves. Before me, there was Phil Donahue. He was the one person who brought in female audiences and talked to them as though they were really intelligent, caring, vibrant people wanting to improve their lives and not just bake Toll House cookies. So everything continues to evolve, and now we’ve evolved to podcasts. The fact that now everybody’s talking, and everybody’s sharing their truth, and everybody has opinions, and everybody feels validated in that expression is a result of The Oprah Winfrey Show. And we were a result of The Phil Donahue Show.

I remember in the early days when people would ask, “Why are people always crying on your show?” Well, people were crying because nobody had ever asked them how they felt about anything. Now everybody’s on social media expressing how they feel about everything. Again, the evolution. 

Throughout the run of your show, you covered a lot of major criminal cases. You recently interviewed a witness from the Lindsay Clancy trial on your podcast. What do you think media is getting right and wrong about that case?
I don’t think media is getting anything right or wrong. I think all the people who are expressing their opinions certainly have full right to express their opinions.

But this is what I know: There will come a time where people will recognize that this was the moment. This was the watershed moment that awakened people, that really stimulated enough concern and outrage that things started to change — “things” meaning research for postpartum depression and psychosis. “Things” meaning people being more aware when somebody says “I’m thinking about hurting my children.” That means it’s a dangerous signal, and that person needs to immediately be taken to emergency. This was very different 25 years ago with Andrea Yates. Nobody understood what postpartum psychosis was. Nobody wanted to look at it or think about those five children being drowned in Andrea Yates’s bathtub. My point is that we’re actually having a debate. The fact that there’s even room for discussion about it is evolution. We have evolved to this moment.

In 1993, I interviewed four women in a Louisiana state prison who had all killed their children. The words postpartum depression did not even come up. Those women were just called monsters, they were called evil, they were called unthinkable. As I sat with them afterwards, they said, “You’re the only person who’s never called us monsters. Why aren’t you calling us monsters?” And I said, “Because I recognize that everybody has pain, and this is what you did with yours.”

I pride myself on my ability and capacity to hear and be able to listen to both sides. I understand why people think that Clancy should be punished and serve time because they don’t understand what psychosis is, just like people didn’t understand what alcoholism was. 

What do you think kept the show No. 1 all those years?
Around ’89, ’90, I told the team, “Do not come to me unless we are aligned in intention.” We didn’t do anything without thinking about intention first. My intention has to be aligned with your intention so that we have the most powerful possibility for presenting an idea or a show to an audience.

That’s really what kept the show No. 1 all those years: because it was intentional. Intentionality is what gives you the strength and the power behind it.