A Tearful Winfrey Explains Her Departure
- ️Brian Stelter
- ️Thu Jun 29 2017
Oprah Winfrey announced that she will end her daytime talk show in September 2011.
“After much prayer and months of careful thought, I’ve decided the next season, season 25, will be the last season of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show,'” the talk show host said on her television program Friday morning.
Ms. Winfrey confirmed what she told her staff on Thursday afternoon: that she is ending her successful daytime talk show in September 2011.
She is expected to concentrate on OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, a cable channel that will bear her name and have its premiere in January 2011.
But she did not mention that channel on Friday. “So why walk away and make next season the last? Here is the real reason,” she said, staring into the camera. “I love this show. This show has been my life. And I love it enough to know when it’s time to say goodbye. Twenty-five years feels right in my bones, and it feels right in my spirit. It’s the perfect number, the exact right time.”
Minutes earlier, Ms. Winfrey had retraced her steps from the start of her nationwide show in 1986 and described a “yellow brick road of blessings that have led me to this moment with you.”
Choking back tears for a moment, she said “you all have graciously invited me into your living rooms, into your kitchens and into your lives. And for some of you longtime Oprah viewers, you have literally grown up with me. We’ve grown together.”
She told viewers that she hoped they would “take this 18-month ride with me right through to the final show.”
During the final season, she added, “we are going to knock your socks off.”
Ms. Winfrey made the announcement before an audience of fans in Chicago, at her longtime studio. “Her predominantly female audience gave her a standing ovation and then hugs when she stepped into the crowd,” Reuters reported. The program is shown at different times on stations across the country.
Ms. Winfrey’s departure — still nearly two years away — will surely be interpreted as an endorsement of the cable TV business and a blow to the fortunes of broadcast television. Discovery Communications, which will co-own the new channel, announced the creation of OWN 20 months ago. Now Discovery will parlay Ms. Winfrey’s anticipated exit from broadcast into higher per-subscriber fees and will also seek more lucrative commitments from advertisers.
For Ms. Winfrey herself, the move represents an enormous bet — that her popularity and golden touch with programming can sustain an entire cable channel and that she’ll remain a central cultural figure even without the mass exposure of broadcast television every day.
It remains unclear what on-camera role Ms. Winfrey will have at OWN, which is a 50-50 joint venture with Discovery, but the channel is expected to make announcements about programming in the coming days.
In a press release on Friday, Ms. Winfrey’s production company, Harpo, signaled that Ms. Winfrey “plans to appear and participate in new programming for OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.” The statement specified that she would appear on OWN “after production wraps” on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”
In separate statements, Discovery’s chief executive, David Zaslav, called Ms. Winfrey a “tremendous partner in Oprah,” and said “we look forward to bringing her and her creative vision, programming and unique voice to approximately 80 million homes on OWN, as well as online through the award-winning Oprah.com.” The chief executive of OWN, Christina Norman, called Ms. Winfrey “the life force behind” the channel who would be “guiding the effort for this completely new 24-hour television experience premiering in January 2011.”