An O-Nalysis: My Recommendations For Oprah

I recently saw a headline over at The New York Times about “Oprah at a Crossroads.” I didn’t read the article because I didn’t want to use up any of my free NYT web-clicks on it, but it looks like the article is about how Oprah’s O magazine is starting to suck wind because it has less ads, which happened because Oprah doesn’t have a show on regular teevee any more, I bet.

See, Oprah decided to go on cable televison with her “OWN,” which is the Oprah Winfrey Network, and so she shut down her regular TV show on original regular television. As a close and careful watcher of television, I wish somebody had consulted me, because this was a bad move.

First of all, I understand maybe somebody figured out a way to put a giant pile of money in front of Oprah for this deal to make sense, Oprahwise, or somebody told her she would be Clothed in Immense Power as the head of her network, or and also Oprah got tired of grinding out her “Oprah Winfrey Show,” which is ridiculous because her fucking life is an Oprah Winfrey Show, but Oprah was on regular TV, the kind you can watch free, if you have a TV and an antennae that can receive the new & improved digital channels, now that the government decided that all the old analog channels, the ones that worked perfectly fine since TV was invented, needed to be sold to companies for other stuff, supposedly to make TV better. I’m not going to argue about that with anybody except to say it made regular TV harder to get, that’s all. Now if you wanna watch free fucking television as was intended by the Founders of Television on a television set you gotta figure out where the TV station is so you can directional your antenna that way, or you might even start thinking about a goddamn TV antenna on the roof of your home or apartment or trailer or camper.

Sorry. Anyway, Oprah pulled her TV show from a zillion regular TV stations, because she was gonna be on her OWN, but when I look on my cable TV box, the OW Network is on one channel on my cable TV, so how exactly is hat a ‘network’?

A network means you have a bunch of different TV stations that band together in a network, not one TV channel on cable, you know? I mean, go look at “ Television Network” on the Wikipedia, and it says, “Not to be confused with television channel or television station.”

Oprah HAD a fucking network on TV, and she swapped it for a channel.

Plus, she swapped it for a channel on the kind of TV you have to pay for. The way it works right now is if you have the cable, the Law says you get all the regular TV channels in your area on your cable for free. Meanwhile, if you have regular TV, you don’t get any cable-anything on it, okay? That means if you had regular TV, you lost your connection to any kind of Oprah except for jackass Dr. Phil and Nate Berkus, with the decorating, which is still on even though it got cancelled, and Rachael Ray, a person whom I can’t believe I am now mentioning regularly. Look, how many people do you think who had regular, free TV decided they could finally afford cable when Oprah retired off to have a “Network” of a buncha shows? Exactly.

So Oprah went from having stuff on regular don’t-cost-nothing TV (plus on cable since it was on regular TV that had to be carried on cable) to having her network of one channel running reruns of “Oprah” plus some Oprah interviews of famous people, plus they run Dr. Phil and Rachael Ray and Nate Berkus and stuff to fill up time because for some reason they don’t want to just show reruns of “Oprah” all the time. They also had Rosie O’Donnell on for a little while, but in my opinion they needed to let Rosie O’Donnell do whatever she wanted and not stifle her, but they didn’t, which is why nobody watched, I think.

Also-plus, Ellen Degeneres crept right in and now she does a Rosie-style, Oprah-style show on regular TV and she’s kicking everybody’s ass with her niceness, which I don’t buy for a minute. That lady is seething, man, just look at her — she’s all bottled up, seriously, in the afternoons.
As a Master Class-level television watcher, my recommendation for Oprah is even if Oprah’s OW Network (channel) doesn’t go off cable, she should get back on regular TV. All she has to do is run “The Oprah Winfrey Show” reruns there, mixed up with her interview show, like once a week, and then show up with a few minutes of new stuff in little breaks during her reruns to remind people she’s still alive, and that way she can keep people who don’t have cable subscribing to her magazine — or at least reaching for it at the supermarket every once in a while.

Previously: How To Be Thanksgiving

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