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go out for ‘Women Who Raise Their Husbands as an Only Child,’ encouraging them to submit résumés?” The beloved humorist may have thought she was poking gentle fun, but Oprah’s producers do maintain a huge computerized retrieval system from on-air solicitations, plus the two to four thousand letters they receive every week, many of which run to several pages of intimate revelations. There are also several separate databases for potential interviewees, guests, and experts on every subject imaginable. Erma Bombeck did not live long enough to see Oprah’s show of April 3, 2008, in which Oprah interviewed a transgender man who became pregnant so he and his wife could raise a child. He explained that he had taken male hormones, had his breasts removed, and legally changed his gender to male, but he decided not to have his female reproductive organs removed. He subsequently gave birth to a girl. That show provided Oprah with a 45 percent ratings increase over the previous week of shows.

Normally, she shrugged off her critics by citing her huge ratings; only occasionally did she admit to being “galled” by their criticism. “My answer to those who say [my] show is exploitative is that life is exploitative, sensational, bizarre, filled with trash and weird things. Television is where these subjects should be discussed.” After all, she added, she didn’t do bigots, racists, and sadomasochists anymore. “And I’ll never do devil-worship again,” she said. It would take her a few more years to acknowledge her embarrassing contributions to trash television. At the time, she maintained that her tabloid shows were educational.

But it wasn’t all squalor all the time on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Though never as substantive as Donahue, she still presented a few serious subjects in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including the escalating crisis in American education and declining literacy among the young. (She promoted that show by looking into the camera and asking, “How dumb are we?”) She explored drunk driving in a show with offenders and victims who had been catastrophically injured by intoxicated motorists. Later she said if she had a twenty-year-old son who got drunk, got in a car, and killed a pedestrian, she would testify against him in court. “I would put his ass in jail. I would say ‘I love you, but your ass is going to jail.’ I haven’t even lost anybody in this way, but the soft laws on this make me crazy. I think when someone is a drunk driver, he should hang. And since I don’t believe in capital punishment, that means you just hang him till he turns blue, then revive him for a while, and then put him back up to hang some more. Then you tie a knot around his privates.… I have no tolerance on this issue.”

She was one of the first to examine sexual abuse of children by the clergy, and she told the story of AIDS in several different shows, including one about whether networks should run commercials advertising the use of a certain brand of condom as protection against AIDS. Despite those in her audience vehemently opposed to such advertising, Oprah announced that she was handing out free samples of “safe-sex kits” that included condoms. She even ventured into public service with shows such as “What to Do in an Emergency,” demonstrating artificial respiration and the Heimlich maneuver. She raised more than $1 million in credit-card donations for Hurricane Hugo victims during a show from Charleston, South Carolina. “This is the quickest response from individuals that we have ever seen in a fund-raising effort,” said James Krueger of the Red Cross.

“The subjects for discussion change over the years,” she said in 1989. “It used to be better sex and the perfect orgasm. Then it was diet. The trend for the nineties is family and nurturing.” To that end she presented shows such as “How to Have a Happy Step Family,” “The Family Dinner Experiment,” “In Search of Missing Children,” and “How to Find Loved Ones,” in which she showed viewers how to track down long-lost relatives.

Her most effective shows continued to be those that touched her own life