Is 'Oprah' going off the air? The end may be nigh for the 25-year daytime TV mainstay if a report at Deadline Hollywood Daily is accurate.
DHD's Nikki Finke cites unnamed insiders as telling her that Oprah Winfrey is about to announce that she's winding down her free broadcast TV show and moving the operation to pay cable. According to Finke's sources, Winfrey's being pressured to end her current show when her contract is up in 2011 (the year that the show will reach the quarter-century mark).
The demands are reportedly coming from the leadership at Discovery Communications, her partner in the slow-to-launch Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) that's supposed to extend Oprah's empire to the pay TV realm. Finke quotes her sources as saying that Discovery wants Winfrey to commit to bringing her talk show to OWN by 2011 or else it will kill OWN in its cradle.
There's been no confirmation of Finke's report from Oprah's camp or Discovery, but Finke says to expect a formal announcement within days.
If Deadline Hollywood Daily is correct, Oprah's move could leave a lot of people unhappy (and not just Winfrey staffers who will have to move from Chicago to Los Angeles). There's CBS, which syndicates 'Oprah.' There's ABC, whose owned-and-operated affiliate stations make up a large chunk of 'Oprah''s syndication market. There are the nation's book publishers, who may consider a cable 'Oprah' a less pervasive and effective platform for book marketing than Winfrey's broadcast show. And there are the viewers, who may not be able to find Winfrey's show anymore, since OWN anticipates being available in only 70 million homes.
Oprah may be getting while the getting's good. While her show is still daytime's gold standard, it's down to 7 million viewers, half its audience a decade ago. In the current advertiser-scarce economy, stations are likely to balk at paying top dollar to syndicate her show. And nothing stays fresh after 25 years; viewers may be as ready as Oprah is to shake things up.
Still, as a brand, Oprah remains as strong as ever. She still has the power to mint new talk-show stars, from Dr. Phil to the latest, Dr. Oz. And even after she sets up a shingle on cable, she could still syndicate her show to the networks if she chose to, though it's unlikely that she (or Discovery) would want to dilute the fledgeling OWN brand by making the show less exclusive. Oh, and lest we forget, Winfrey's still the richest and most powerful woman in the TV industry.
If she can figure out a way to make this work and still give everybody a new car (figuratively speaking), she will. One should never count Oprah out.
-- Gary Susman
