OPRAH
is
BACK
Not “Oprah has appeared on television.” Not “Oprah has launched another earnest streaming special.” Oprah is back in the old sense: chairs, guests, moral instruction, a live audience, applause.
It is a podcast in roughly the same way a Buick with a microphone in the cupholder is a radio station.
THE STARTLING
PART IS THE AUDIENCE
Podcasts were supposed to free us from this. Two people could sit in a room, say things, and the listener could decide privately whether either person had said anything worth hearing.
There was no illuminated applause meter hovering over the conversation. No congregation to certify which sentence had achieved righteousness.
OPRAH HAS APPARENTLY SOLVED THIS DEFICIENCY.
During one discussion, a woman invoked the Lindsay Clancy case and said, essentially, that if a Black woman did the same thing, she should receive the same treatment.
The audience did not merely agree.
THEY
ERUPTed.
It had the quality of a snake-handling service in which someone had just produced the correct serpent.
This is what makes the new Oprah fascinating. The statement itself invites an obvious question: what exactly is the standard we are promising to apply equally?
Lindsay Clancy’s case is bound up with questions of mental state, culpability, postpartum mental illness, evidence and criminal responsibility.
“Treat everyone the same” sounds magnificent until one notices that nobody has yet established what “the same” means.
NO MATTER. THE PHRASE ARRIVED. The room recognized it. APPLAUSE.
And there was Oprah, nodding.
AUDIENCE
RESPONSE INDEX
At a certain point you begin wondering whether Oprah and the audience are being held at gunpoint. Not literally, obviously. Nobody needs to investigate a studio for a hostage situation. It simply becomes the most entertaining explanation for the extraordinary synchronization on display.
GUEST SPEAKS.
AUDIENCE DETONATES.
OPRAH NODS.
America heals.
AGREEMENT,
CONVERTED INTO
REVELATION
A person at home might hear a sentence and think, “I suppose that sounds reasonable, although I have several questions.” Put several hundred people together and suddenly the same sentence is not an argument. It is an event.
That was one of the great peculiarities of the old daytime talk show, and apparently somebody decided civilization had suffered enough without it.
There is also something wonderfully dishonest about calling the thing a podcast once you have restored the live audience.
The useful distinction between the old show and the new podcast collapses fairly quickly when Oprah is sitting in front of people who clap on command—
or, perhaps more frighteningly, do not need to be told.
IS IT A
PODCAST?
The Oprah Podcast has everything a modern podcast requires. Every requirement: met. Fully. Without exception.
A sentence enters the atmosphere, the appropriate receptors fire, and several hundred hands begin striking one another while Oprah gives the solemn nod of approval.
None of this means the principle of equal treatment is objectionable. Quite the opposite. If someone commits the same act under materially comparable circumstances, race should not magically alter the moral or legal analysis.
What matters is the act, state of mind, culpability, evidence and law. Which is precisely why turning the matter into an applause line is so strange.
A SERIOUS PRINCIPLE HAS BEEN CONVERTED INTO AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION.
But perhaps that is unfair.
Perhaps this is exactly what America has been missing since 2011: a large room in which strangers can tell us when a sentence is good, followed by Oprah nodding so we know the strangers are correct.
SHE DOES NOT NEED TO ANNOUNCE THAT A MOMENT IS IMPORTANT. THE NOD DOES THE WORK. ONCE DEPLOYED, THE THOUGHT HAS PASSED INSPECTION. SOMEWHERE, METAPHORICALLY, A BELL RINGS.
WELCOME
BACK, Oprah.
All that remains is for someone to explain what, exactly, makes it a podcast. Apparently we had not finished this chapter after all.
APPLAUSE ISSUE · NO. 04
SET IN ARCHIVO BLACK, OSWALD,
BODONI MODA & COURIER PRIME
GAYLE KING
GETS THE
OF DEATH
Gayle King interviewed a juror from the Lindsay Clancy trial on Oprah’s new platform and, for a few seconds, became the math meme.
She already knew the holdout was a man. Then she learned there had been one Black juror.
YES.
> WAS THAT BLACK MAN THE HOLDOUT?
YES.
What makes the moment revealing is not merely that King was surprised. The information visibly disrupted the interpretive framework she had been using to understand the case.
Her internal casting points one way, the racial script points another, and the gender script supplies a third. The juror performs none of them cleanly.
AND THE
SYSTEM
CRASHED.
Whatever person she had mentally placed in the holdout seat, “Black man” did not fit the character she had loaded.
The long accumulation of narratives about who receives sympathy, who distrusts institutions, who is victimized by prosecution, and who is expected to recognize bias.
A male juror rejecting a defense centered on postpartum mental illness fits neatly into another familiar story about men, women, empathy, and female experience.
It broke her model of reality.