Watercooler Pick
The Oprah Conversation
- Series
- Where to Find It: Apple TV+
- Rating: TV-MA
- Release Date: 2020
- Seasons: 1 Season
- Length: 59 minutes
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For 25 years, from 1986 to 2011, the groundbreaking Oprah Winfrey Show became a national touchstone, the one talk show that could draw in everyone, uniting races, classes, generations, and geographies. If you didn’t see it when it aired at 4 or 5 pm, you heard about it in the news. She was warm, ebullient, incisive, and wise, easing her guests and audiences into the hot topics of the day, or sometimes just the hot diversions of the times.
As her star rose, Oprah elevated and anointed newsmakers, fostering intimate and difficult conversations like a calm, sage therapist. When she got her own network, OWN, in 2011, the talk show was over, and we lost our collective “hearth.”
During the pandemic, amidst escalating racial tensions, she returned to what she did best, and Apple TV’s The Oprah Conversation was born.
Her guests have ranged from the activist and creator of “Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man,” Emmanuel Acho, to bestselling authors like Isabel Wilkinson, who wrote Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, to icons like Dolly Parton, Stevie Wonder, Will Smith, and Mariah Carey…to the man she introduced to the world: Barack Obama.
At a time when Twitter mobs pounce and polarize people on complex issues, The Oprah Conversation brings much-needed perspective, nuance, and dialogue. Her wide ranging guests represent the issues of the day, and they save their best revelations for their sit down with “the Queen of All Media,” speaking honestly about fraught issues, shedding new light and fostering more reasoned debate.
A timely, much-needed series that combines raw honesty with the guidance only Oprah can bring, offering a road map for how to respond — and how to move forward.
Yourself, your quarantining mates, and your friends/colleagues/relatives with different backgrounds. The show is meant to spark ongoing dialogue.
Where to stream it: Apple TV+
- Moods: enlighten me, inspire me, stretch my mind
- Interests: conversation worthy, documentary, fresh perspectives, star power
Melissa Roth
