The Oprah Phenomenon

Spiritual Talk: The Oprah Winfrey Show and the Popularization of the New Age

125 Spiritual Talk The Oprah Winfrey Show and the Popularization of the New Age Maria McGrath Nineteen ninety-four was an important year for OprahWinfrey. In anticipation of her upcoming fortieth birthday, she began a radical program of self-transformation. To gain control over her lifelong battle with weight, she decided to abandon all fad diets for a more consistent plan of healthy eating and a strict daily running schedule. In a Ladies’ Home Journal interview in November 1994,Winfrey reflected on her commitment to her new exercise regime: Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it. . . .This is the hardest thing there is for me. Nothing is harder—work, accomplishments, achievements—than the actual mental and physical discipline that it takes to do this.But this is what I have to do to get the kind of mental and physical sharpness that I want.1 This kind of vigilance, and a closely controlled diet, took the talkshow maven from a size twenty-four to a size eight between 1993 and 1994.2 After putting her personal house in order,Winfrey turned to the long-brewing discontent among her staff. In response to a near mutiny against the tyrannical reign of executive producer Debra DiMaio, Winfrey encouraged DiMaio to bow out.The vacancy was filled by the promotion of less dictatorial senior producer Dianne Atkinson Hudson. 1 Maria McGrath And in the vacuum created by the absence of DiMaio’s micromanagement ,Winfrey stepped in and assumed a more prominent role in the daily production of her show.3 It is unclear whether the personal milestone of turning forty or the new makeup of her staff inspired Winfrey and her cohorts to reinvent her show. Either way, in 1994 Winfrey took stock of her then eightyear -old program. Assessing the past and future of her talk show in a September 1994 Entertainment Weekly interview,Winfrey recalled an especially unsavory moment during an earlier program: The day I felt clearly the worst I’ve ever felt on television was sometime in ’89 when we were still live and we had the wife, the girlfriend, and the husband, and on the air, the husband [unexpectedly] announced to the wife the girlfriend is pregnant .And the expression on her face—it pains me to think of it—I looked at her and felt horrible for myself and for her. So I turned to her and said,“I’m really sorry you had to be put in this position and you had to hear this on television.This never should have happened.” That’s when I said,“We cannot do this anymore.” I can’t say we never did another show with conflict, but that’s when I first thought about it.4 At the time,Winfrey admitted that she thought the confessional format had educational value. Real people confessing their troubles could raise the country’s awareness about issues traditionally kept secret at great cost to their victims, such as sexual abuse, infidelity, and sexual identity crises. But as she reached that milestone birthday in 1994,Winfrey found herself getting impatient with her guests’ whining about the unfairness of their lives. She explained her newfound desire to motivate change and not simply wallow in pity:“I have to move on.We’re not gonna book a show where someone is talking about their victimization. . . .The last time I did a show on women being stalked, they said how hard it is, and I recognize it is. But five years ago I would have been more sensitive to it. Last year I said [to the stalked women],‘So move. So move!’”5 Searching for a new focus for her program,Winfrey turned to the insights of the New Age movement.A spiritual seeker herself,Winfrey harvested the complex of New Age practices and beliefs to halt her Spiritual Talk 1 show’s descent into talk television’s fetishization of human cruelty and psychological dysfunction. She abandoned the shock format and made spiritual uplift,individual will,personal responsibility,and grand cosmic design the guiding principles of her shows. Initially,Winfrey may not have comprehended the degree to which these choices would attach her show to the New Age movement. She may have been unaware of the countercultural origins of post-1960s “seeker” mentality or the history of post-1960s American religiosity; yet, by making...