Latest news with #OprahWinfreyShow
Time Magazine
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
'Making Oprah' Is on The 100 Best Podcasts of All Time
History Any person with a passing interest in Oprah Winfrey should check out this thoroughly researched, captivating dive into the media mogul's Chicago years as the host of the Oprah Winfrey Show from 1986 to 2011. The podcast focuses on how the daytime TV icon changed American attitudes toward race, gender, and politics. But the series also branches out into a larger discussion of the massive impact talk shows in general had on societal attitudes in the 1980s and 1990s. Host Jenn White interviews producers, executives, and Winfrey herself to learn what makes Oprah different from any other luminary in pop culture. It might not be entirely surprising that it has a lot to do with her work ethic and meticulousness, as demonstrated by an entire episode dedicated to the massive amount of preparation and logistical coordination that went into the famous 'You get a car!' moment. The WBEZ Chicago team repeated the same formula with a follow-up season, Making Obama, and has since experimented with a more sprawling format with one-off episodes covering figures like (more controversial) Chicago native Kanye West and, most recently, an entire season on the creation of daytime soap operas.
Perth Now
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Oprah Winfrey doesn't miss talk show
Oprah Winfrey doesn't miss her talk show. The veteran broadcaster helmed the Oprah Winfrey Show from 1986 until 2011 and while she loved being able to connect with the audience, she admitted making the programme and delving into hard-hitting topics became very "hard". Speaking on the Let's Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa podcast, she said: "I miss the everyday conversation. I miss the conversations afterwards. "As much as I loved the audience, I'm telling you, the nature of what we were doing every day became just so hard." And Oprah admitted her producers would get "overwhelmed" if the programme didn't win awards so she eventually stopped submitting herself for the major prizes so her team could focus on "doing the best work possible and she could focus on "putting out the effort to do good things, to be a force for good in the world". She added: "It's not gonna be measured by an award at the end of the year. It's measured in every viewer response. "I've said many times, your legacy is every life you touch. It's measured in all the lives that are being affected by what you're doing and saying. "I still hold in reverence all the opportunities we had to reach into people's lives and be there for them in ways that mattered." The talk show was known for its generous gifts and giveaways to the studio audience, but Oprah admitted it became stressful trying to outdo the last competition, and had a realisation when one producer suggested sending someone into space. She remembered thinking: "It is time to bring it down." The final season of The Oprah Winfrey Show saw Oprah take more than 300 of her audience members to Australia for eight days, and while she enjoyed the experience, there were logistical difficulties her team hadn't thought of. She said: "What we didn't realise is 90 percent of the audience didn't have a passport. "So the producers were, like, out of their minds trying to get passports for the people in time for the show in Australia." Oprah made her comments after Kelly - who co-hosts Live with Kelly and Mark with husband Mark Consuelos - asked when she would know it was time to "step away" from the show, which she has fronted since 2001. The 71-year-old star insisted it wasn't yet "time" for her interviewer to move on. She said: "First of all, it's not time for you to step away. And I, if I were advising you, I would say absolutely not. "[You and Mark] are in a groove, and that groove continues to work." Oprah praised the tone of the show for being "easy" and "light" but also "serious enough when it needs to be." And Oprah argued that Live... is "vital and important". She said: "Don't let go of the platform that you have. "Do not do it. Don't even consider it, because I feel that the reach that you have, the audience that you've built, the family that you've created — both inside the studio and in the rest of the world — is really more vital and important now than ever before."
USA Today
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Why Oprah Winfrey 'would never' go to space like best friend Gayle King
Oprah Winfrey isn't joining her bestie Gayle King by going to space any time soon. The ex-"Oprah Winfrey Show" host got candid on the July 16 episode of the SiriusXM show "Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa" about why she skipped going on the infamous Blue Origin flight in April with her BFF. "I would never do it, but I became very interested in the whole process," Winfrey said. The Oprah's Book Club creator told Ripa that she was "just so proud to be there for" King, adding she was "relieved" that the "CBS Mornings" host went to space, "because if she'd asked one more time, 'What should I do? Do you think I should go?' I, from the beginning, was like, 'You should do it.'" Winfrey also revealed that she told King not to "let Katy Perry come down and say, 'It was really great fun.'" Kelly Ripa shuts down Mark Consuelos' 'repulsive' morning habit For the mission, King joined pop star Perry and billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' now-wife and author Lauren Sánchez Bezos along with three others for the first all-female flight to space in decades. However, the flight from Bezos-backed exploration company Blue Origin garnered widespread criticism. Still, Winfrey encouraged King to adventure. "You're going to be really saying, 'I should have done it,'" she recalled telling King. "The minute somebody says, 'Oh my God, like a life changing experience,' you're going to go, 'Oh, I should have done it.'" Oprah says July book club pick hooked her 'until the very last shocking sentence' The "Oprah Winfrey Show" star confessed that she knew it was time to leave her eponymous daytime talk show, which ended in 2011, when her team suggested they send an audience to space. "I remember going into a meeting and someone saying, 'I think what we should do is try to get people on a spaceship, or we should be able to take an audience or some audience members up on a spaceship,'" Winfrey said. Oprah Winfrey tells Kelly Ripa not to 'walk away' from 'Live' talk show After making the admission, Winfrey gave her fellow talk show host a word of advice and told her that "it's not time for you to step away" from "Live," which Ripa hosts with husband and actor Mark Consuelos, because "you have fun and it's easy and it's light enough. And serious enough when it needs to be, and it's not a grind." The "Oprah Podcast" host said that she loved hosting her own show, but it was different than Ripa's because the "Oprah" show dealt with heavier topics, sharing with the "All My Children" alum that "the nature of what we were doing every day became just so hard." Gayle King on 'disrespectful' space backlash, celebrity friends 'throwing shade' "Don't let go of the platform that you have. Do not do it. Don't even consider it," Winfrey said. "Because I feel that the reach that you have, the audience that you've built, the family that you've created – both inside the studio and in the rest of the world – is really more vital and important now than ever before."
Daily Mail
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Oprah as you've never seen her before! Weight loss queen, 71, debuts trendy new look at Beyonce concert
Oprah Winfrey debuted a fresh look as she attended the opening night of Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter Tour in Los Angeles on Monday. The 71-year-old media mogul, who has dropped more than 40 pounds over the past year-and-a-half, was on trend in wide-leg jeans and sneakers. She was joined by best friend Gayle King, Gayle's daughter Kirby Bumpus, mentee Thando Dlomo, and Tyler Perry. The group coordinated in white, light wash denim, and black leather outfits as they documented their night out. 'Tonight's the night! The outfits have been picked... @ beyonce we are on the way,' King captioned an Instagram post. Winfrey's Oprah Daily account wished them a great time, sharing a video clip and quoting Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em in the caption, writing: 'Throw your keys up, @beyonce! Have fun @oprah, @gayleking, @thando_d, @kirbybump, and @nicolemangrumhair.' 'Guess where we're going! We're ready!' Gayle shouted at the top of the snippet before her billionaire pal began chanting, 'Giddyup.' Earlier in the day Oprah Daily shared a piece of content showing the former Oprah Winfrey Show host surprising Thando with a ticket to the highly-anticipated concert. 'I forgot to tell you that I got a ticket for you...' Oprah started before Thando — who was part of the first graduating class of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy — interjected and said, '...for me to go where?' Thando was in disbelief when her longtime mentor revealed she was going to the opening night of Beyoncé's tour. She broke into song and dance outside of a Whole Foods store in LA as she celebrated. Oprah looked better than ever, layering a light wash denim trench coat over a snug-fitting white turtleneck. The fashion-forward star's face was fully made up, and her thick, brunette locks were arranged in a side part and loose, cascading curls. She accessorized with a pair of round, frameless, lightly tinted sunglasses. Winfrey's Oprah Daily account wished them a great time, sharing a video clip and quoting Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em in the caption In late 2023, the Mississippi-born superstar revealed how she shed weight by making a lifestyle change. 'It's not one thing, it's everything. I intend to keep it that way,' she told Entertainment Tonight at the time. Winfrey previously insisted that she had not turned to weight loss drugs. She opened up about body image while speaking at a panel in New York City for Oprah Daily's The Life You Want series in September 2023. 'I don't know that there is another public person whose weight struggles have been exploited as much as mine,' she reflected during a conversation with Weight Watchers CEO Sima Sistani, psychologist Rachel Goldman, and obesity specialists Fatima Cody Stanford and Melanie Jay. She noted she once thought, 'I felt I've got to do this on my own because if I take the drug, that's the easy way out.' Shortly after the panel, the Color Purple star confessed about using GLP-1 medication, 'I now use it as I feel I need it, as a tool to manage not yo-yoing.' 'It quiets the food noise,' she revealed to People in December 2023.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Opinion: Trump's Speech Reduced American Democracy to a MAGA Game Show
Can you talk a country to death? In the longest address ever delivered by a president of the United States to a joint session of Congress, Donald Trump attempted on Tuesday night to prove that yes, you can. But contrary to what it may have felt like to viewers trying to remain conscious throughout Trump's tsunami of lies, bluster, and weird little asides, the threat to the nation's health was not that the speech was so soul-crushingly stultifying. Indeed, the fact that it was so boring actually served to obscure the profoundly dangerous agenda Trump was promoting and the destructive nature of the actions his administration has already taken. This is not an unusual tactic among despots. Not only do they love to hear themselves speak, but they speak in ways designed to desensitize a populace to the threat they pose. Putin, Hitler, Kim Jong Un, any leader of the Chinese Communist Party, name your autocrat and you have likely heard them drone on and on until they have somehow turned their outrageous ideas, propaganda, tedious stories, and narcissistic self-references into an anesthetic cocktail so powerful that it would numb people to their intended outrages. While the U.S. president clearly took a page out of the book of these leaders he so admires (perhaps literally given that his first wife said he kept a book of Hitler's speeches on his nightstand), he deserves some credit for adding a Trumpian twist to his test of American attention spans. Drawing on his TV experience, he offered up an approach to selling his autocratic agenda that might be called game-show authoritarianism. During the speech, he did not just spin his usual bulls--t into a truly breathtakingly ambitious and intricate Bayeux Tapestry of lies. He also tried to candy-coat his malignant intentions by regularly turning to carefully curated members of the audience and telling their stories in ways that combined elements of This Is Your Life, The Price Is Right and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Previous presidents have given shoutouts to people sitting with their first ladies and assorted friends in the balcony of the House chamber. But never did any call out so many human props and then offer some of them real-time rewards for being willing to appear on TV as a member of Team Trump. A kid suffering from cancer was made a member of the Secret Service—a moving distraction from the fact that Trump has frozen funding for cancer research. A cop was heralded for his heroism and Trump announced a proposal to give cop killers the death penalty—a chutzpah-rich sleight of hand to draw attention away from the fact that Trump himself incited a riot in the very building in which he was speaking and then pardoned the criminals who attacked the police. Another human prop was offered admission to West Point, others had initiatives named after them. (Sitting near them all, Melancholia Trump, the president's understandably sourpuss wife, managed to maintain a dignified scowl throughout.) That is not to say the stories of many of those singled out were not moving. Many had suffered grave losses. (Not all of them. There is some debate about whether the details of one woman's case concerning her child being forced by their school in the direction of a gender change are actually accurate.) But the evening became more about awarding cash and prizes to members of the audiences than it did about real policy initiatives. When Trump's agenda items were discussed, many of them were also designed more to trigger audience reaction than they were to actually address real issues. There was probably more discussion about gender roles and transgender athletes in sports (out of half a million college athletes there are fewer than 10 who are reportedly transgender) than in any presidential speech ever. He honored a girl, Payton McNabb, who was injured in a volleyball game by a transgender girl and then promised to deny federal funding to all schools who didn't honor his ban on transgender athletes. The showmanship, the gimmicks, the touching vignettes, all served a purpose, of course. They were to ensure that the morning papers in towns across America would be filled with human interest stories and that they would bury the scarier bits of Trump's plans. For example, he suggested people needed to brace themselves for a 'little disturbance' in the economy—as his tariffs sent markets tanking and worries about a recession soaring. He promised to 'take back' the Panama Canal. He even said we would claim Greenland 'one way or another,' which, as it happens, exactly the kind of direct threat to a NATO ally (Denmark), which the alliance was created to forestall. But was it just bluster or was it Vladimir Putin's newest ally opening up a threat on the Atlantic Alliance's western front? Trump touted his 'government efficiency' operation run by Elon Musk and said it had identified over $100 billion in savings. But who would take time to discover he was off by a factor of six when there were grieving families being exploited? He hailed RFK Jr., his HHS Secretary, and his promise to make America healthy again, even as Kennedy was failing to effectively address the spreading measles outbreak and cuts in USAID funding were blunting our ability to identify and stop the spread of global pandemics. (The other day, Musk said that was a mistake they made and corrected. He was wrong. They made the mistake. But they didn't correct it.) Yes, if you were paying attention, you knew that the issues discussed by Trump in between the showbiz flourishes included fabricated problems at Social Security that were clearly being offered as an excuse to make cuts at that organization that nearly 80 million Americans depend upon, promises of more attacks on the environment, stated commitments to withdraw further from the international institutions generations of Americans had sought to build, more threats against our neighbors, the embrace of crazy bad economic policies, and threats to the rule of law in the United States. There was a sharp irony when, moments before Trump hailed his leadership in restoring free speech to America, one of his wingmen, House Speaker Mike Johnson, had Democratic Representative Al Green escorted from the House Chamber because he had the temerity to shout that Trump did not have a mandate to destroy Medicaid. This happened even as the GOP engaged in countless noisy public displays of affection for the president throughout the event. Admittedly, one of the most worrisome aspects of the entire extravaganza was the sight of the gathered Democrats in the audience sitting inertly, shaking their heads periodically, holding up little round signs of protest and generally appearing impotent, leaderless, and no match for the Bloviator-in-Chief. Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan gave a good, solid, earnest response to Trump's speech. But for bleary-eyed Americans, after Trump's Wagnerian-duration performance, more speechifying was the last thing they were likely in the mood for. Somehow Donald Trump made tedious the outrageous fact that he was attacking the foundations of our democracy, the power of the very Congress he was addressing, the judiciary whose leaders were arrayed before him, the readiness of the military whose chiefs sat just a few feet away from him, our economy, institutions upon which tens of millions of Americans depend, our values, our allies, our standing in the world, and our viability as a global leader. He made a moment of unprecedented danger to America dull. Which was, of course, his intention. And if he could leaven it all by working his audience, offering them big, big prizes, and basking in the cheers of Republicans who might as well have been responding to an applause sign over their MC-in-Chief's head, all the better. It might even have made it seem, well, normal. Which it most assuredly was not.
