Oprah will decide in the next few weeks if she can keep up the daily grind — or throw in the towel on the most famous daytime TV show of all time.
The talk show queen’s contract is due to expire in 2011, at the end of her 25th year on the air.
And in a surprise move yesterday, officials at Oprah’s show said she will decide by the end of next month if she wants to go on.
It’s not the first time Oprah, now 53 and one of the richest people in the country, has gone through a public will-she-or-won’t-she drama over retirement.
In 1997 and again in 2002, Oprah said she was thinking seriously about leaving her show — but both times renewed her contract for several more years.
And at least some industry experts believe she’ll be back — at least for a few more years.
“Why would she walk away?” says Marc Berman, who writes for Mediaweek magazine, specializing in TV syndica- tion.
“She’s No. 1, and she’s got her talk show down to a science. She’s a very smart businesswoman, and she’s not going to walk away from this,” he says.
This time, however, one thing is different.
Oprah is launching her cable channel — the Oprah Winfrey Network or OWN, for short — sometime next year and signs are that she is showing great personal interest in running it herself.
The co-executive producer of Oprah’s talk show, Lisa Erspamer, was named as chief creative officer at OWN — more or less, the person in charge of finding shows for the new channel.
The new channel is a joint venture between the Discovery networks and Oprah — and Erspamer is among the first execs hired by the network who has worked with Oprah for a long time.
Some reports surfaced yesterday — after the announcement that she would decide her future by Dec. 31 — that Oprah was ready to move from Chicago to LA and put her show on the cable channel.
Those reports were quickly denied by Oprah’s production company, Harpo, and CBS, which syndicates her daytime show.
A CBS official said the deadline was Oprah’s idea — but if she was going to leave, a year and a half’s notice would be fair for all the businesses involved.
Though she still has the top-rated daytime show, Oprah’s ratings have, in fact, fallen by about one third in the past five years.
No matter, says Berman, no one is around who can fill her shoes.
“Nobody can be the next Oprah,” he said.