YMMV / The Oprah Winfrey Show

• Creator Worship: She has such a massive influence on the people who watch her show that you could ask anyone who's ever worked at a bookstore, and they would probably have a story about a customer who wanted to purchase a book, but had no idea what the book looked like, or what it was even about. All the customer knows is that "Oprah said it was an amazing book" so they had to have it. Heck, the beef industry sued her for defamation simply because she said she was going to stop eating beef due to Mad Cow Disease fears (which would most likely cause hundreds of thousands of people to stop eating beef as well, just because Oprah was going to stop).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In a 2004 episode titled, "The Fat One In the Family", we met a young woman who was very fat while her much slimmer sister was loved due to her looks and her own father acted cold towards her due to her weight. A few years later in an update show, we learned that she opted for gastric bypass surgery, lost over 200 pounds, was much happier with her life (and family relations) and now had a husband, which she said that she probably wouldn't have if she didn't lose the weight. However, come a 2013 "Where Are They Now?" episode, we learn that she cannot have children, which she always wanted and it's something she explains is due to her gastric bypass.
  • The famous car giveaway came with a pretty hefty price tag for the winners. When reporting the cars on the show's tax forms, they were listed as "prizes" instead of "gifts", and being prizes, the recipients became responsible for an additional $28,500 on their personal income, which led to a lot of audience members either forfeiting the cars entirely or selling them off to cover the income tax.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Jumping the couch" became a popular term after the whole Tom Cruise fiasco.
  • "YOU GET A CAR! AND YOU GET A CAR! AND YOU GET A CAR!"
  • "It's ♪JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHN TRAVOOOOOOOOOOOOOLTA~!♪" (the captions add the notes to show she's using a sing-song voice)
  • "YOU ARE GOING TO AUUUUUUUUUSTRAAALIA", more common among Australian audiences.
  • The "So what is the truth?" reaction gif
  • BEES!!!
• Never Live It Down:
  • Tom Cruise jumping on her couch became this for both people involved.
  • Putting the phony memoir A Million Little Pieces on her list. She was pissed when the truth came out.
    • Followed by endorsing The Secret, which basically states that you can get anything you want as long as you wish really hard for it.
  • "Over 9000 penises"
  • Giving everyone in her audience a new car.
    • The backlash she got when that audience learned they had to pay taxes on those cars.
• Nightmare Fuel: One of the people Oprah interviewed was a woman who was mauled by a chimpanzee, who left her disfigured by facehugging her.
• Shocking Moments: On episodes where she gives a ridiculous amount of stuff away, like her "Favorite Things" episodes and the episode where everybody in the audience got a free trip to Australia. The last few episodes of that nature had paramedics on standby.
  • Let's not forget the episode where she gave everyone in the audience a brand new car.
• Spiritual Successor: It is generally recognized that Oprah took over Phil Donahue's niche in the talk show market - The rise of Oprah and Donahue's opposition to The Gulf War were often cited as the two main factors behind his show's demise in 1996. Winfrey herself has acknowledged, "If it weren't for Phil Donahue, there would never have been an Oprah Show."
  • The Ellen Degeneres Show is one for Oprah's show, really taking off around the time that Oprah was finishing up and defining daytime TV as much as she did. It helps that Ellen clearly positioned her own show as one, including several campaigns to have Oprah appear on hers (which she eventually did).
• Tear Jerker:
  • A number of her guests, as well as her last show where Kristin Chenoweth performed a song for her.
  • One particularly poignant moment had a dying woman make a series videos for her young daughter to remember her by and other tips and instructions. When Oprah made the eventual announcement to her audience on a later show that she had died, she was crying. On a happier albeit bittersweet note, as sad as the moment was and how her widower and daughter still grieve her, an update of the family had the father happily remarry a great woman and they also had a daughter together.
  • Another episode featured Céline Dion talking about her family and her then only son, who was just a little boy at the time and the other guest was a Happily Married couple who gave birth to a premature baby girl. The baby was so small at birth, that her size was comparable to a Barbie doll and whose story made both Oprah and Celine cry as it was being told. Thankfully, the girl eventually recovered and the parents came onstage with their infant, smaller than most babies her age but thriving.
  • Jacqueline Saburido, the young woman who was horrifically burned in a car crash caused by a drunk driver. Her story and her kind, forgiving spirit was nothing short of courageous.

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