The Oprah Winfrey Show

Proud to say I never saw one.

Everyone is going to rush to say the Tom Cruise couch jumping, but my personal fave is the one where she tore creepy James Frey a new ASSHOLE.

The one where that guy pooped on the stage

I liked the one where she admitted she embraced shallow fads all the time and did not stay with them because they were cheap quick fixes.

Oh wait--that never happened...

This isn't "my favorite" because I didn't watch Oprah's show. Someone told me about seeing this on YouTube and it sounded pretty out there. Dr John E. Mack (and some of his patients) are interviewed about his work with people who reported being abducted by aliens.

The Diva-off between Mariah and Whitney. Whitney slayed. It was humiliating for both of them, though. I also liked the Sound of Music cast reunion show.

This groundbreaking one.

And of course this!

The one with all the arrogant, self righteous mothers who say they trained their kids to know better than to talk to strangers only to find all of their children, easily went off with the strangers arranged by the show.

See, I can imagine that this footage alone could tank her against Trump in a campaign. He can support genocidal monsters and threaten nuclear war, etc., but Oprah giggling after making a Freudian slip would REALLY turn America against her.

The two-part tell-all Whitney Houston comeback interview. I hesitate to say it was "good" because you could clearly tell Whitney was not back up to snuff and was leaning Into the media's narrative of Bobby being the destructive force in her life that she was now free of...and Oprah wasn't especially interested with investigating Whitney's downward spiral beyond scapegoating Bobby Brown...and yet those are the very reasons why it fascinates me.

It was Whitney taking the stage again way before she was ready.

There's no way Oprah didn't know Whitney was still in trouble. She really should have pulled her aside and urged her to delay the comeback.

Then there was the Oprah episode where she focused on male survivors of molestation. I thought that was a pretty powerful subject to explore and one the populace really doesn't pay much attention to.

I loved the Madonna episodes (Mary!). I really liked her final episode as well.

This is hilarious at 7:25. She tells Lindsay Lohan, “what I feel from you deeply and profoundly is that you just don’t have head intelligence.” I have a feeling it’s taken out of context and she finished it with “...but also heart intelligence” or something, but I wish it were as edited here.

The one where she spread fear by endorsing the Satanic Panic myth concerning day care centers.

I agree with r7. I loved her show best when her guests were ordinary, real people, some of them from controversial new stories, and the audience members got to ask the guests questions. (Some of the audience members ended up looking like jackasses and assholes, such as in the episode that r7 referenced, and rightfully so.) I'd love to watch some of those episodes today; it would be truly a time capsule of society issues and fashion. The show was educational without stepping over the line into being exploitive.

But eventually she became THE STAR, and the show was all about what SHE thought of the guest's situation. Audience questions were eliminated so there would be more time for Oprah's opinions (and her daily standing ovation upon her entrance). After she stole Phil Donahue's model and drove him out of business, she trashed the model and replaced it with her live-your-best-life bullshit, which sought to establish her as a guru and cross promote her magazine.

Billy Bob Thornton's entrance.

Her Interview with Mark Fuhrman was a very good show and a good display of Oprah's skill. The Whitney interview was heartbreaking if you were a fan. We knew she was in bad shape for years but she was clearly not sober and was lying and deflecting during that interview. It was supposed to be a triumphant return. Instead, she had lost her beauty and her voice and that quick sweetness that used to be hers. Her soul WAS laid bare in a way and it was in shreds.

Oprah and Gail go back in time was damn funny. I happened to see the day that Oprah blurted out unexpectedly that she had been a crack user when she was in a bad relationship. She said it to support a guest who was telling her own story of humiliation and loss. Oprah started crying and just told the world that she had been through it too. It was pretty moving to tell the truth.

Three Words: The Legends Ball.

Oprah: You know why I think you were jealous of her?

Betty: Why?

Oprah: YOU SHOT HER.

I never really sat down to watch Oprah, but I’ve seen parts of her shows. There’s a reason why Oprah became so successful with her show, and I don’t understand why people hate her. I just admire her success.

The one when she went off the air.

The one where she started pushing 'The Secret'. It confirmed my low opinion of her.

My favorite episode was the lesbian who was caught having sex with her friend at 10 years old. The video is some where on Youtube but the episode is about a woman who is with another woman yet she never had a relationship with a woman before. The woman she was fucking with was the one who was caught at 10 years of age fucking a friend by her mom.

I do love when she half-heartedly mouths the wrong words to her favorite songs while boogeying to them. That could jazz up the campaign trail. And you know her campaign song would be a Michael Bolton-Alicia Keys duet.

The Fuhrman show. Oprah was a good interviewer on many days. I loved her journalist voice, it's one of the best in the business. She used it mostly for voice overs and more and more...speeches.

Never seen one and don't plan to.

I remember the one in which the audience was only made up of restaurant servers,

They were such assholes about how they deserved big tips and how customers who couldn't afford the proper tip shouldn't be eating out.

I've hated servers ever since.

The one when they sorted the audience by eye color and gave special treatment to one group was bizarre. People were IRATE and screamed at one another about their superiority and inferiority based on eye color. It really was too ridiculous to believe except that the audience was rabid.

Uh, I think you misse a few points there, R26. Never saw the episode, but servers do indeed deserve proper tips, and if you can’t afford to tip properly than you can’t afford the meal. So hating servers “ever since” is kindof a big dick move on your part. I’ll bet you’re a real treat to dine out with.

The one where Oprah introduced Streisand Saunders to Barbra Streisand holding a spray-painted white microphone.

Poor girl

The one where she brought a wagon of her body fat on stage and then got fat again six months later.

It's so hard to remember a single show, but all of these posters are bringing up good ones. I only watched sporadically, but I did see a lot of the shows mentioned above.

I SO agree r15.

She did way too many episodes with that really fat woman who couldn't loose weight (Stacey Halprin), and she gave too much attention to the multiple personality person (when MPD is questionable as a real disorder) - linked here - and her obsession with molestation was annoying. She was proud that she did "50(?) episodes devoted to sexual abuse" or whatever.... and I was like - you know the majority of your audience has not been sexually abused and doesn't plan on doing sexually abusing anyone....right? She did a lot of shows on abandonment by parents too...constantly trying to heal her own wounds. Her focus became too narrow on her personal issues, and bringing guests on to talk about what went wrong that mirrored her life.

How about the one where psychic supersleuth Sylvia Browne told a woman her missing daughter was dead? The woman died a couple of years later, and her captive daughter found out about it on the news where she saw the Oprah clip. That was one of Ariel Castro’s victims in Ohio, who eventually escaped.

I miss her daily show. Amazing life story about her starting from nothing, being black and a woman too, and now here she is. True, she stumbled along the way, but haven't we all? My two favorites was when she had the original movie cast from Sound of Music and when Black Eyed Peas were on when she was in Chicago and many of the audience did a flash mob. Amazing! (I've Got a Feeling...)

R15, Oprah stopped having "ordinary people" mostly yelling at each other on stage when Donahue went off the air in New York. Coincidently the 1992 LA riots happened at the same time. She raised the level of the program, and I was happy. What I didn't like was that she eventually stopped going into the audience to get their questions.

R32 Oprah really became Oprah because she was candid about traumatic and humiliating life events. She’s a reader, and writers know that writing honestly about such things is what makes writing engaging and universal. But Oprah’s religiosity combined with that definity fueled delusions of grandeur and a really stunning level of narcissism. Still, she doesn’t seem to have a sociopathic narcissistic personality disorder like Trump does...she has more of a messiah complex. I don’t blame her for believing in “The Secret” if living that way got her from poverty to where she is. If she believes she willed it, then it’s hard for me to tell her she’s wrong!

Interesting R36. What in the hell is a sociopathic narcissist personality disorder? Tendencies overlap but there is no such thing. Oprah is pretty far from demonstrating antisocial personality traits. There is no reason for the word sociopath and Oprah to ever be in the same sentence. People throw that word around too easily.

R37 Sociopathy and Narcissistic Personality Disorder are discrete personality disorders, but many of the traits overlap. Donald Trump checks off all the charactetistics of both. Oprah is narcissistic in a colloquial sense given her self-centeredness and her obsessive reflex of making most conversations that can be about anything about Oprah. So people call her a narcissist. I’m saying, OK, yes, Oprah’s world revolves around Oprah, but she clearly has empathy and compassion and is not the sort of narcissist/sociopath that Trump is. That’s the point I was trying to make. I know a lot of people who call both Trump and Oprah narcissists; he is in a clinical sense without any doubt. She is just self-centered, but seems truly motivated by making positive changes in the world and loving and respecting people.