It will be sad to say goodbye, but I look ahead with such a knowing that what the future holds is even more than I can see. Winfrey, 61, along with OWN and Harpo presidents Sheri Salata and Erik Logan , emphasize the significance of having their team all under one roof, particularly when the 4-year-old network is still in an early growth stage, expanding both its offerings and its reach. It fares even better among its African-American core audience, with ratings up 12 percent year-over-year in that demo.
The closure of Harpo, which had produced more than hours of original programming exclusively for OWN, will impact roughly employees, who will remain employed through December. See more The Resurgence of Oprah Winfrey.
The drama will chronicle a spirited woman who leaves her upscale Los Angeles lifestyle behind to claim an inheritance from her recently departed father — an acre sugarcane farm in the heart of Louisiana. Once a shooting schedule for Queen is set, Winfrey will be able to figure out what more she can — and cannot — do as an actor.
Without rattling off titles, Winfrey reveals that she will be heading to New York in the next couple of weeks to take a closer look at two other potential plays. Among the other things still on her to-do list: more scripted programming at the network. At OWN, Queen Sugar will join a quartet of Tyler Perry -scripted series — all of which recently secured additional episode orders — as well as the upcoming two-night Octavia Spencer- led miniseries, Tulsa , already in development.
The Harpo move comes nearly a year after real estate developer Sterling Bay Cos. During this time, Winfrey had formed a new division called Harpo Films. In ABC and Harpo Films announced a three-year agreement under which Harpo would produce six made-for-television movies for the network under the "Oprah Winfrey Presents" banner, extending the relationship between ABC and Harpo, which had already produced several miniseries, movies, and primetime specials for the network.
The company also optioned the rights to The Keepers of the House, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Shirley Ann Grau, chronicling the lives of a wealthy white Southern landowner, his black housekeeper, and their three children from the s to the s. Other projects in the pipeline for the company included adaptations of Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on a novel of the same name by Zora Neale Hurston, which was slated for airing in In , after eight years in syndication, Winfrey was at a crossroads both personally and professionally and began to think about retirement from the talk show industry, which had become characterized by scandal and theatrics.
Instead, however, she opted to alter the focus of her show, moving from popular controversies to featuring poetry, music, literature, authors, and actors, as well as human issues such as dealing with the loss of a child, weight loss topics, and the like. The following year, Winfrey signed an unprecedented contract with distributor King World, extending her show through the end of the 20th century.
Winfrey also became one of King World's largest shareholders, with more than a million shares to her name.
At the conclusion of the television season, Winfrey was honored with the most prestigious award in broadcasting, The George Foster Peabody Individual Achievement Award. She also topped the Forbes list of the highest paid entertainers in the United States, bumping Bill Cosby out of the spot.
In September , Winfrey announced the formation of Oprah's Book Club, an on-air reading club, created with the idea of inspiring more Americans to read.
All of the books Winfrey selected for the program became instant bestsellers, averaging over a million copies sold each. At the start of the television season, Winfrey announced the creation of Oprah's Angel Network, a national effort encouraging her audience to do charitable work and make charitable financial contributions.
One of the hallmarks of the Angel Network was The World's Largest Piggy Bank, a campaign that encouraged viewers to save their small change for a national fund to provide scholarships for college students; another was the volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity to build homes for the poor.
The late s brought some challenges to Winfrey and her company. A group of Texas cattle owners filed a lawsuit against her in alleging libel due to comments she made on her show about Mad Cow Disease. The trial was watched closely by First Amendment rights advocates worldwide, and the jury eventually found Winfrey innocent. While the lawsuit was ongoing, Winfrey took over a local theater in Amarillo, Texas, turning it into an impromptu set for her show.
In October oprah. Two months later, Winfrey announced the creation of Oxygen Media, a new cable channel targeted at women. By the end of the 20th century, "The Oprah Winfrey Show" claimed a viewership of some 20 million throughout the world. A ,circulation rate base was planned for the bimonthly magazine, which went to a monthly issue later that year. Harpo and Hearst promoted the magazine as a personal growth guide for women ages 18 to Oprah planned to appear on the cover of each issue, and begin and end each issue with a first and last word, exhorting readers to use their lives to "make a difference in somebody else's.
After the first issue debuted, editor in chief Ellen Kune resigned but cited family demands and denied any tension between herself and Oprah. Advertisers lined up quickly to secure ad space in the new magazine, proving the influence of the Oprah brand, characterized as intelligent, empathic, spiritual, and courageous. By , Oprah's talk show, boasting 23 million viewers, had been the top-rated daytime show nationwide for 17 years.
As the show's contract with King World came to an end, Oprah suggested that she might leave the show. However, she eventually renewed the contract through the television season, planning to tape episodes per year, with a final year consisting of shows and celebrating the program's 25th anniversary. Oprah said that the renewed contract would give her company a chance to create and develop more projects and shows, as it had the very successful "Dr.
Phil" show, starring psychologist and advice guru Dr. Phil McGraw. Oprah, and Harpo Inc. Harpo was ranked among Black Enterprise's "Industrial Service ," garnering notice as the largest business with majority African-American ownership. Principal Subsidiaries: Harpo Films, Inc.
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