奥普拉的世界--传播奉献的福音

“Oprah’s Big Give”: it’s the name of Oprah Winfrey’s new Sunday-night prime-time show—a reality show in which contestants are challenged to give money away in creative ways—but, beyond that, it’s a neat three-word summation of what Winfrey stands for, what she’s achieved in her career, and the image of her in many people’s minds. Let’s start with the last of these words. “Give”: that’s what Winfrey does, though the way she usually puts it is that she “gives back.” And, like so many of her common touches, it makes people love her even more, because they know that she wasn’t given anything to begin with. Giving—whether it’s love, money, hope, inspiration, shopping tips, or a car—is why she’s here. (Winfrey is one of those people who are able to believe that they were put here for a reason.)  “Big”: what is there about Winfrey that isn’t big? Her personality, her gestures, her voice, her dreams, her empire (she’s worth two and a half billion dollars), her own solid physical self, her confidence, her talent—all very big. “Oprah’s”: You name it, she owns it, and her name is on it. It’s hers. Among the possessive trademarks that Winfrey controls are Oprah & Friends, Oprah’s Angel Network, Oprah’s Book Club, Wildest Dreams with Oprah, The Oprah Store, Oprah Boutique, and Oprah’s Favorite Things. The design of the letter “O” used in the title of her magazines, O, The Oprah Magazine and O at Home, is trademarked. Leave it to Winfrey to have a trademark on the letter that’s the symbol for the element oxygen; it’s as if she owned the very air we breathe—not to mention that she was a co-founder of the TV network Oxygen, and that, it was announced two months ago, she is starting up a new venture called the Oprah Winfrey Network, whose acronym is OWN. Snap! Go to Oprah.com and sign up to join “Oprah’s world,” and stay on top of all her activities, which are taking place everywhere, all the time: on TV (her talk show is seen in more than a hundred countries), on the Internet, in movies, in bookstores, on Broadway, on newsstands, in South Africa at her school for young girls, in New Orleans reporting on Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, in Des Moines endorsing Barack Obama. And yet nothing and no one is neglected: Winfrey is simultaneously celebrating those who came before her (such as the twenty-five notable African-American women she honored at a three-day gala a few years ago), those who will come after her (kids who get off their butts and do things), or perhaps—in her teahouse on her estate in California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with her cocker spaniel Sophie—herself. Winfrey’s reach does have its limits. As of this writing, she owns only one planet, and Chicago hasn’t been renamed for her, but these are early days; she’s only fifty-four years old.

Winfrey has been an occasional presence in prime time, producing and, sometimes, acting in TV movies. Those are one-shot deals; with “Oprah’s Big Give,” she’s entered a competitive field, where even a show that’s attempting to do good must also do well, though it’s not as essential here as it might be for other shows. There are only eight episodes, and even if the ratings go down—which they did, to a not insignificant degree, in the second week—would you cancel Oprah’s show if you were ABC? No, I didn’t think so. But, even if the series ends after one go-round, Winfrey can rejigger the gimmick of people giving away money to strangers—and it is a gimmick, for better and for worse—for use on her talk show; it would not be uncharacteristic of her to repackage her mistakes as learning opportunities for viewers.

And mistakes there are. Surprisingly, given the generally seamless appearance of Oprah’s manifold enterprises, in which a variety of pursuits and, often, divergent values (consumerism and altruism) are fused in the melting warmth of her generosity, “Oprah’s Big Give” stands out as a weird, misbegotten creature that perhaps shouldn’t have been taken out in public. Winfrey’s idea was to spread the spirit of giving across the land—a spirit that through her numerous philanthropic undertakings she has embodied to an extraordinary degree, transforming, in ways both concrete and intangible, the lives of countless people. Winfrey rarely fails to live up to her inspirational image; when she does, it’s news. Two years ago, it became known that James Frey, a writer whose memoir she had touted, had embellished and invented some facts in the book; Oprah made it clear that she felt betrayed. When Frey went on her show to apologize, the nation watched as Winfrey skinned, gutted, and filleted him, basted him with vitriol, and baked him in a 10,000º oven for one hour.

Frey’s transgressions didn’t fit Oprah’s usual kind of story line, and it threw her off. Most of the time, viewers are left with little choice but to respond as the story has ordered them, whether it’s to cry, buy, or reach for the sky. At the beginning of her talk show the Friday before the première of “Oprah’s Big Give,” which Winfrey, master cross-promoter, used to kick off the new series, she looked hard at the camera and said, “You will be inspired.” Well, yes and no. “Oprah’s Big Give” is a game show, two of whose executive producers are creators of “The Amazing Race,” which, with its anxious-making challenges and frenzied country-hopping, it resembles to a depressing extent. Each week on “O.B.G.,” contestants from different backgrounds—among them a former Army captain, a Nigerian immigrant who hopes to become a doctor, a “title holder in the Miss America Organization,” a TV producer who has been a paraplegic since getting into a car with a drunk driver years ago, and a twenty-two-year-old dot-com millionaire—are flown to a new city and charged with accomplishing a particular charitable task within a severely limited amount of time. In the series opener, which was set in Los Angeles, they were given twenty-five hundred dollars each and a picture of the person they were assigned to help; they had five days to accomplish their miracle and were given no further instructions. The second week was set in Denver; here the contestants were given forty-eight hundred dollars and forty-eight hours, and told to go find their own stranger to help out.

Contestants could use the money they’d been given for, say, expenses in trying to get a fund-raiser off the ground; they were also free to simply dole out cash if they thought that answered the call of the occasion. At the end of each episode, three judges grade them on their individual performance, and the one who shines most dimly in the areas of creativity, leadership, presentation, and accomplishment is sent packing. There you have it: give big or go home. What none of them know is that the last giver standing wins a million dollars (the basic unit of currency in many game shows). So much for virtue being its own reward.

Winfrey is mostly an unseen presence, ceding the floor to the host, Nate Berkus, a designer and a regular on her talk show, and the judges, all of whom have hands-on philanthropic experience: the football player Tony Gonzalez, Malaak Compton-Rock, the wife of Chris Rock, and Jamie Oliver, the young English chef who has revolutionized school-lunch programs in his country. She doesn’t really stick her hand in until about halfway through the second episode, when, from her office in Chicago, she gives us, right before a commercial break, a “big-twist alert,” which turns out to be not a twist at all but merely a promotion for a car company. Oprah, you lied to us! The “twist” is that the competitors get to give away the Ford S.U.V.s they’ve been driving—ugly, shamelessly gas-guzzling behemoths. Winfrey tries to imbue this overt tie-in (Ford S.U.V.s were used in Los Angeles as well) with a sense of drama, and it sticks out as a disappointing moment. Not to overlook the fact that the cars are a genuine boon to most of the recipients, this show is supposed to be about reaching out, building bridges, touching lives, not about trying to burnish the reputation of a company that has brought near-ruin on itself.

By now, many viewers, I suspect, will have misgivings about the show, which, though it has moved me to tears at least half a dozen times, I feel is not Winfrey-worthy. Its premise has some disturbing aspects: why is it a competition, why are there time limits, and why do people have to leave? If they fall short, why don’t Oprah and her celebrity judges give them another chance and teach them how to do better? Some of the schemes are imaginative and pay off big, but who knows what fruits some of the less “creative” gifts will have in the long run, or even in the short run—meaning after the TV cameras leave. Reality-show clichés abound: in promos for the third episode, fights among the contestants were highlighted, a kind of come-on that’s antithetical to the spirit of the show. And then there’s the O factor, always a distorting lens on reality. We see communities coming together to raise money for their neighbors, a restaurant manager facilitating a fund-raiser for a wounded Army veteran, a company donating twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of office furniture to a children’s home, contractors donating their time and labor, and on and on. It’s very impressive, but Winfrey has made sure that all the largesse on display is somehow associated with her; the contestants tell every would-be donor about the Oprah connection, and, while many people might take a pass on something called “The Big Give” (quite possibly because, following a strong American tradition, they are already donating time and money, quietly and of their own accord), who could possibly say no to “Oprah’s Big Give”? On her talk show the day after the first episode aired, Winfrey said of the series, “I think this is going to inspire people to see how just the smallest thing makes a difference in other people’s lives.” I think I see a new trademark heading this way: Oprah’s Smallest Things.