Put it next to the little red wagon.
When the complete history of Oprah is written, the sensational special we watched with Harry and Meghan will sit, no doubt, with the top five moments in an already insane career, up there with the one in 1988 when the talk show host, in her size 10 jeans, came out with a wheelie loaded with 67 pounds of fat, corresponding with her weight loss then.
It was an instantly iconic artifact of pop culture … as is this new CBS interview, going by the waterfall of Oprah gifs and memes we’re now seeing (gifs and memes, of course, being the metric we now use to quantify what we used to call “water-cooler conversation”).
Of that interview, more than enough has been written and deconstructed about the emotional banquet laid out by the Sussexes. My personal viewpoint? Though there were obviously many woeful things unveiled — unacceptable, too — there were also many, many things left deliberately obtuse, a trail of impressions designed to rouse emotion, a high-stakes game of persuasion specifically framing things to appeal to Americans who only understand the celebrity aspect of the monarchy, not its nuances. Many things can be true at once: my mantra.
But enough about that. I am here to talk Oprah, who, in a sherbert-coloured jumper, peering from behind her Harry Potter specs, showed, over two hours, why her old daytime show was once our collective living room. Why it’s near-impossible to explain to those younger the singular-ness of her…
