No, Oprah's Departure Isn't "TV's Doomsday"

Get to be a big enough brand and you can go by a single name. Gisele. Brad. Angie. Ellen. Rosie. Jay. Martha. Get to be an even bigger name brand and you can go by a single letter: "O."

As everyone except white males age 40 to 70 now knows, Oprah will leave her show to move to cable. The way the news is being handled one might expect this to happen, like, next month. But the move is still more than a year away, in 2011. That isn't stopping anyone from telling us what this move means. But what if it means nothing?

The Oprah Winfrey Show is the most successful American daytime talk show ever. Oprah herself is a national icon, the only entertainment personality, of many who tried, that one can genuinely credit for helping get Barack Obama elected President. Her interests are the nation's, either because they really are or because she makes them. 

While Oprah's recent visit with Sarah Palin proved a tremendous ratings windfall for the show, not all of Oprah's guests can be controversial vice-presidential also-rans. And before Palin and this week's announcement brought her back into the limelight, the relevance of Oprah's brand was in decline.

Not only has Oprah, who brand is largely rooted in "trust," suffered several scandals of trust in recent years (including controversial "quack" medical cures and James Frey's fake memoir), but her ratings were in the toilet. In July, Oprah's show was averaging a 3.2 household rating, its lowest since debuting in the early 1980s.

Oprah's success has created the very competition that is killing her. As with all things today, the marketplace is fragmented with more options. Wendy Williams, Ellen DeGeneres. Tyra Banks. Bonnie Hunt. Judge Judy. All of these current daytime show hosts represent a fragment of Oprah's whole. Viewers can now just watch whatever particular Oprah trait they want that day.

Oprah's move to her own cable network brings the communications industry soothsayers out of the woodwork. Some see this as "a definitive moment to help illustrate what has been (and will continue to be) a long and steady and complex demise for broadcast television." But while network TV will suffer from Oprah's departure, the writing has been on the wall for so long that its fate is well beyond the reach of Orpah's whims.

Others see Oprah's move to cable as dangerous, on par with Howard Stern's tremendous satellite radio misadventure. This won't happen, because so many already pay for cable.

The only unifying characteristic of these theories is that they're grandiose. Nobody is predicting one of the most likely scenarios, nothing changes: A bunch of people continue to admire and watch Oprah, and she remains an icon, if one whose importance is increasingly historical, rathar than a current force in the culture. Barring kiddie porn charges or O.J. Simpson-esque behavior, brands such as Oprah's do not experience wild shifts in importance and strength, regardless of what the press thinks hopes.