Oprah With Show Topics Related

Oprah

With show topics related to hair styles, childbirth, and wardrobe makeovers, the Oprah Winfrey Show is unabashedly geared toward a female audience. Its intrepid host tackles weighty matters, especially those related to important health issues. Thus, Winfrey's show is not as frivolous as many of its daytime counterparts. Live audience members do become passionately involved in the show, alternating among such emotional reactions as applause, shouts, or moans. Yet no matter how excited the studio gets, it rarely erupts into mayhem even when controversial topics are up for discussion. One recent Oprah show entitled "Wombs for Rent" addressed sensitive issues related to fertility and the lengths women and their partners are willing to go to have a child. Martha Stewart's 42-year-old daughter, who appeared on the show, spends what many people earn in one year on her monthly fertility treatments.

Understandably, audience reactions vary when such subjects are raised. Winfrey understandably attempts to stir up controversy to keep the show interesting, and reveal the diversity of her audience members. One strength of the Oprah Winfrey Show is the host's ability to tackle weighty subjects gently and with respect for differing points-of-view. No one system of values or beliefs triumphs over any other, except for common sense. Winfrey does not preach and avoids shows about religious dogma. Morality is presented in a relatively straightforward manner. For instance, on the "Wombs for Rent" episode, the host and various audience members challenged the rights of women like Alexis Stewart to buy their way into motherhood. Moreover, the show exposed the debate over whether motherhood is an unalienable right for women who would have been considered well past their prime even just a decade or two ago.

On the one hand, audience members seemed angry, perhaps jealous, that women like Stewart can afford to boost their wombs. The host is particularly sensitive to issues related to class, and urged her guests and audience members to think hard about the way social class impacts opportunity. On the other hand, many audience members nodded in sympathy at the genuine desire to bear a child. Motherhood does, in fact, link women together regardless of their social backgrounds. As most of Winfrey's audience members are female, few were not unaffected by the topic. The audience members selected to participate in the question-and-answer sessions asked a range of questions related to their personal experiences with trying to have children. "Wombs for Rent" called into question the notion that motherhood is a right -- or even a duty.

Winfrey rarely gets religious. However, the Oprah Winfrey Show can be undeniably New Age. The word "spiritual" is tossed around a lot. Recent episodes have been relatively mundane, though. For instance, an episode on interior decorating allowed the Oprah Winfrey Show to lighten up after the heaviness of "Wombs for Rent." A designer named Nate Berkus was the feature of the episode. Berkus seemed to already be of celebrity status, as a substantial number of audience members seemed familiar with, even enamored by, him.