It's Official: Oprah Show to Shutter September 9, 2011

It is truly the end of a a talk show era.  Variety reports that the Emmy-winning The Oprah Winfrey Show will broadcast its final interview in September 9, 2011 when Oprah's syndication deal ends.  The show will have run for 25 years.  Oprah Winfrey, the show's host, announced the shows end to staffers at her Chicago-based Harpo Production Company yesterday and will make the news public on her program today, November 20th.  The Oprah Winfrey Show airs on ABC at 4pm EST.

There is speculation that the daytime talk show special will continue on Winfrey's new network OWN, a partnership with Discovery Communications. OWN will have the rights to the 25-year catalog of The Oprah Winfrey Show, so it is expected that Winfrey will have a major presence on cable television.

According to Variety, rumors of the show's conclusion on ABC began swirling severAl Weeks ago when Lisa Erspamer, co-executive producer of The Oprah Winfrey show since 2006, was tapped chief creative officer of OWN.

In a statement "Oprah" distributor CBS said, "We have the greatest respect for Oprah and wish her nothing but the best in her future endeavors. We know that anything she turns her hand to will be a great success. We look forward to working with her for the next several years and hopefully afterwards as well."

To read Variety's report in its entirely, click here.

The Oprah Winfrey Show is the highest-rated talk show in American television history. It is currently the longest-running daytime television talk show in the United States, having run nationally since September 8, 1986, for over 23 seasons and thousands of episodes.  On the Oprah Winfrey Show, the talk show queen has interviewed nearly every major celebrity, presidents, and dignitaries from around the world and is considered responsible for launching the careers of now famed personalities such as Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.  A indisputed stable of American television culture, Oprah has been included in Time magazine's shortlist of the best television series of the twentieth century in 1998, and it made the top 50 of TV Guide's countdown of the greatest American shows of all time.  The show garners an average of 8.5 million views per original broadcast and 4.5 million for repeats.

In addition to a media personality, Oprah Winfrey is an actress, television producer, literary critic and magazine publisher.  One of the country's biggest supporters of the arts, she is the producer of Broadway's Color Purple, having starred in the film version.  She is also the producer of the current indie hit Precious and will voice a character in Disney's upcoming Princess and the Frog. Oprah has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century and the most philanthropic African American of all time, and was once the world's only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world. Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others. In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race, an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate.  She has defined herself as an inspiration to "the people" everywhere through such programs such as her Book Club, encouraging literacy, and her South African school she recently built in South Africa for young girls, a feat she has called her "proudest achievement."  

Come the fall of 2011, talk T.V. will certainly never be the same.

 

 

To post a comment, you must register and login.