Rosie O'Donnell returns to TV
Nearly a decade after she left her successful daily daytime show to take care of her children, ODonnells The Rosie Show premieres tonight on the Oprah Winfrey Network. ODonnell made the decision after Winfrey visited her home for what became a four-hour meeting.
I said I would want to carry the torch of what she had done so well, ODonnell said in an interview as she sat in her office at Harpo Studios in Chicago, pictures of pets and children on the shelves behind her desk. ODonnell tapes in the same space where Winfrey taped The Oprah Winfrey Show before it ended in May after 25 years.
They chatted about ODonnells life and why she wanted to go back to television, ODonnell said.
At the end she said, Lets do this. I said, Lets do this. I feel sort of a responsibility to reach for her standard of excellence, ODonnell said about Winfrey.
The two women have lots in common: Both have had self-named magazines; both say they would be teachers if they werent in entertainment; both shared the Daytime Emmy for Best Talk show Host in 1998; and now both will share the same cable network and audience.
It seems a good fit for ODonnell, a 49-year-old mother of four whose show-starting monologues joke about menopause, weight gain and depression. She promises longer, in-depth chats with a single celebrity after little or no preinterviewing by her staff for the hourlong show.
We have to evolve it in a way thats authentic, said ODonnell, who is friends with mega-celebrities such as Madonna and Tom Cruise. She said her endearing, fanlike curiosity about the famous has changed over the years.
At almost 50 my interest in celebrity is how it affects our culture, she said.
ODonnell calls OWNs January debut a soft launch and said she considers todays premieres of The Rosie Show followed by Winfreys Oprahs Lifeclass, the networks hard launch. ODonnell is on at 7 p.m., leading into Winfreys p! rime-tim e program at 8 p.m. Oprahs Lifeclass will have Winfrey share her feelings about old segments from The Oprah Winfrey Show.
There is a certain amount of pressure to build OWNs audience, said Bill Carroll, a television syndication expert with Katz Television Group in New York.