Monica Potts will not miss Winfrey‘s talk show:
The 10th anniversary issue of O magazine just hit newsstands. The glossy is just one part of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire — which also includes the eponymous show, a cable network, and a new cable network that is a joint venture with Disney and may host reruns of her show after she departs ABC, the network she’s been at for 25 years. This month also marks the release of an unauthorized biography of Winfrey by Kitty Kelley. O magazine was the final step in Oprah’s transition from talk show host to self-affirmation guru. She has become, to an insufferable degree, a force of nature that teaches Americans to pat themselves on their backs.
In the beginning, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured standard talk-show fare — people who had either gone through or performed heinous acts. There is (paging American studies) not a large amount of scholarly work on talk shows, but what there is shows what we already know to be true: Comparing one’s life to the lives of those comparatively worse off makes you feel better.