[AKAtude]

Oprah Heading to Prime-Time
by Bridget Byrne
Jun 11, 2002, 5:45 PM PT

Oprah Winfrey is giving a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to Oxygen.

The talk-show mogul will host a new primetime daily show this fall for the femme-oriented cable channel.

But Oprah After the Show seems to be a kind of tit-for-tat deal.

Winfrey is a prime investor in the struggling Oxygen net, launched in 2000. Believing in the concept of targeting upscale thinking women, she ponied up $20 million and handed over certain rerun rights to her syndicated The Oprah Winfrey Show for a 25 percent interest in the cable channel.

However, in the April issue of Fortune magazine, Winfrey is quote as having regrets. "I would rather have put $100 million into Oxygen and kept my shows than put in $20 million and given them away," said the super-wealthy media star.

Now, according to Washington Post TV columnist Lisa de Moraes, Winfrey has those lucrative rerun rights back. Instead of repeats of her daytime show airing in September as planned, her new chat show will debut in their place. Oprah After the Show premieres September 16 and will run weeknights at 7:30 p.m. ET, repeating twice each night and once early the following morning.

Oprah After the Show isn't going to be much of a stretch. The host--who insists she will be leaving the air in 2006 and plans to scale back her daily duties before that--won't even have to get up out of her seat. The show is designed as a tagline to her day job. She'll tape each episode immediately after completing her syndicated talker, communing with the in-studio audience, which will be corralled for double duty.

"We are going to kick off our shoes, take questions from the audience and see where the conversation takes us," says Winfrey.

Geraldine Laybourne, cofounder and CEO of Oxygen, says, "There are a tremendous number of working women who never really have a chance to watch Oprah during the day. We are going to give people a chance to see Oprah."

Not many women are getting or taking the chance to watch Oxygen, which is only available in 41 million of the country's 105 million homes. Many more women seem to prefer rival Lifetime, the "Television for Women" cable channel, which is top-rated with viewers and advertisers.

Winfrey first appeared on Oxygen in 12 episodes of Oprah Goes Online, a how-to series criticized for being just a way for her to catch up on how to use the Internet, something working women viewers probably already knew how to do. The series occasionally airs in reruns. Additionally, 13 episodes of her show Use Your Life aired on Sundays last summer.

Laybourne calls the new arrangement with Winfrey a "win-win situation." Oxygen is hopeful that this new show will generate better word of mouth, putting pressure on cable operators to add Oxygen to their line-up. If so, that will be good for everyone's investment, including Winfrey's, whose Harpo Inc. empire is estimated by Fortune to be worth about $1 billion.