The Chris Moeller Archives

The last Oprah

I have Wednesdays off so I was able to watch the last episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show this afternoon. She greeted us by saying there would be no more surprises, unlike the various celebrity walk-ons that I've been reading about for the last few weeks. Too bad. That's what I was hoping for. Oprah has never been my bag, but I enjoy highlight shows, and Chris Rock, as just one potential participant in such a show, is always funny.

Watching her intently for an hour this afternoon confirmed that her show really has been, for 25 years, the opposite of what I really go for on television. There's no sense of irony to it. She radiates none of the cynicism I feel is required for each of us to cope in a world of powerful and dangerous manipulations, though she has a parallel message of courage and self-empowerment that's very important. She revealed today, for example, that she has done over 200 hours of episodes alone on issues of child abuse.

There were very few video clips even in her last hour. It was mostly monologue, and I was shocked at how quickly the hour seemed to go. That is a mark of a great broadcaster, and I can marvel at that the way I marvel at Howard Stern's ability to entertain me on the radio sometimes for better than three hours at a time. But watching a final episode designed to be a sort of encapsulation of the host's core values and ideals, it's pretty obvious again why she wouldn't be a fan of Stern, or even the two long-running television shows of David Letterman.

As everyone is already well-aware, these other programs are quite coarse and mean-spirited by comparison, and they also delight in draining the pool of the sort of self-seriousness that Winfrey swims in at nearly all times. There is certainly no difference in the way that the three hosts are opportunistic in respect to their shows. In Oprah's case, we saw that manifest itself this past week with the way that Maria Shriver, recently victimized in a very public way by her husband, was inexplicably drawn into the host's inner circle. As an interviewer, Oprah is a sort of anti-Howard Stern, but that’s not a compliment. Stern is the most entertaining, penetrating public questioner we’ve got, and Oprah’s Q-and-A’s with celebrities and public officials have little of the same unfiltered directness or “edge-of-your-seat” unpredictability.

Of course her show has an audience that is heavily-female, and that's not my gender, but I refuse to attribute my disinterest in her show over the years to that certain tangible. (I love Tina Fey and Roseanne Barr TV concoctions, for example.) I rolled my eyes several times during today's broadcast for very specific, different reasons. First of all, you have the continuous, now-infamous, and ridiculous camera cutaways to the reactive faces of people in her studio audience. Their strong belief in whatever Oprah is selling at that moment is always about as subtle as a prostate exam. On a comedy talk show, we would have to equate this to cutaways of seeing people laugh, but you rarely see this since the early days of the medium, unless the person is being singled out for a specific comedic reason.

Second is her promotion of "miracles" and the way she couples this with such distasteful self-aggrandizing. Oprah believes in miracles, I'm paraphrasing from today, because she is the product of a one-time only sexual encounter between her parents, and because she rose from an impoverished childhood all the way to the high public stage she stood upon today.

For Oprah, you see, everything in her life can be categorized as "miraculous"—her career opportunities, her personal success, her friends, the lives she's touched, the lives that have touched her, etc. She appeals to all of the people who hope for miracles in their lives and are eager to categorize them. Immediately following the broadcast of her show today, the syndicate station in Des Moines promoted the top story for their 5 o’clock local newscast. It was about “a miracle” in Joplin, Missouri. I didn't stay tuned, but the gist, I gathered, was that one or more persons in Joplin stayed safe during the deadly tornado Sunday by securing themselves inside of a large appliance. (I can't remember if it was a refrigerator or freezer.) A young girl came on the screen right away and said "God saved me," and the words “God saved me” were helpfully posted by the station's news department below her image. How about “science saved you,” or better yet, ”you saved you”? Dropping yourself inside an almost-impenetrable, unbending metal contraption was a pretty clever maneuver, I say.

Oprah has been promoting a religion of sorts for 25 years, and she made those parallels verbally explicit today. She devoted at least five full minutes during the hour to the promotion of a deity, or greater power, that guides her life. Then her very last words for the entire run of the show were “To God be the glory.” It's been a faith that promotes the positive attributes of personal empowerment and tolerance, but it has also been one, in my opinion, that has not particularly caused discomfort for the already-most-comforted.

Aside from a high-profile endorsement three years ago, her show has always been decidedly apolitical, despite touching often on social topics that have major political elements and realities. Her show, for example, has been much less political than the Phil Donahue show of the 1970s and early ‘80s, from which it derived its format.

But that's probably as people prefer it. It occurred to me again today that I was probably not her most-receptive audience member when she ordered us all to listen to and follow that disembodied voice (my phrase) that we hear in our heads, referring to it more than once as the "voice of God." Last month, at the National Atheist Convention, when the actor and comic Paul Provenza inscribed his book to me with the very contradictory message, "Fight the imaginary power," he may have been preparing me to combat just this particular pitch.

It's the arrogance that's tied up into all of this that's so off-putting. Believers certainly tell me that they find atheists arrogant so you'll have to believe me when I tell you I see it in the opposite. I don't believe we live in a human-centered world, which is going to be an inescapable contradiction for anyone dealing with the Oprah Winfrey Show. I see hers as a self-centered conceit in itself. I believe that the universe will go right on expanding long after the climate of Earth becomes uninhabitable for its most-evolved animal species.

The idea that everything that happens on the Earth, from the conscious decisions that we make as humans to even our very physical conceptions, to me, has more to do with chance than with any sort of "miracle," and I resent Winfrey's bold pronouncement today that her beliefs in a divinity (even a non-denominational one) should be accepted by the rest of us. It should come as no surprise perhaps, given her worldview, that Oprah has frequently been duped by her guests, whether they be authors of dubious intent and promotion, various "self-help" shysters, even a few celebrities promoting junk science, such as Suzanne Somers or Jenny McCarthy, or some combination of the above, like Dr. Phil. Also, it's worth pointing out here that no political figure ever feared going on her show. Whether it was an Obama, Bush, or Palin-- it was understood in Washington that an appearance on Oprah would make you look good.

A few seasons in, she cleaned up her act a bit, trimming away the more Springer/Sally/Ricki/Montel elements of the show in favor of what amounted to a sort of career tribute to the poet of inspiration Maya Angelou. We all know she made a lot of money, and she spent a lot of it on very worthy ventures. I'll give her credit too in that, while she seemed to pass judgment at times on a lot of other entertainers (particularly comics) with differing values than hers, such as a Letterman, Stern, Rock, or Tracy Morgan, she eventually opened her show to most of them.

It's hard to guess what her legacy will be. On one hand, she's leaving really no other TV show like hers still on the air as she exits. The traditional "confessional" type of program she transformed for herself lives on mostly now via some tacky, very un-Oprah-like reality shows. On the other hand, her intent was always to reach and inspire people in a more one-on-one basis. As her mail and email attests-- and here I do not doubt for a minute her reports of her personal correspondence, she has touched millions of fans, and succeeded at inspiring them in just the way she intended. At its most fundamental level, that often profound connection between messenger and messen-gee is what television is about, and few, if any, have ever taken it to such heights of emotion and impact.

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Different topic entirely: I guess we should all be thankful that there isn't a nuclear power plant in Joplin, Missouri. Can you even imagine? Yet there are many nuke plants in the Midwest, as we know. Someday, right? And we can't prepare for or prevent the worst-case scenario unless we swear off nuclear power for good.

posted by CM @ 5:02 PM