Oprah's 'Next Chapter' Draws 1.1 Million Viewers
Oprah Winfrey is back on television with a new talk show. But some of her fans dont seem to know.
The premiere of Oprahs Next Chapter, the once-a-week successor to her five-day-a-week Oprah Winfrey Show, drew an average of 1.1 million total viewers for two showings on cable Sunday night, far fewer than the six million to eight million that had watched her previous talk show on local TV stations each weekday.
Ms. Winfrey ended The Oprah Winfrey Show last May in order to concentrate on OWN, which is short for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Since then, viewers have been awaiting her next talk show, which she called Oprahs Next Chapter.The first Chapter was shown on Jan. 1, exactly a year after OWN was started. The episode was a two-hour interview and visit with Steven Tyler, the lead singer in the band Aerosmith. Future episodes will be one hour long.
OWN executives anticipated that ratings for Ms. Winfreys new show would be lower than the ratings for her old one. She and her station partners had years to build up The Oprah Winfrey Show into the highest-rated talk show of its kind, and they had far less competition than Oprahs Next Chapter now faces on Sunday nights.
Still, the ratings that came in from Nielsen on Tuesday seemed disappointing.
OWN declined to say whether the premiere had lived up to expectations. But in a news release, executives called it the highest-rated Sunday premiere in the one-year history of the channel. OWNs ratings thus far have generally come in below the expectations of the TV industry.
OWN also noted that the episode built on its audience, drawing more viewers in the 10 p.m. hour (1.2 million) than it did in the 9 p.m. hour (984,000).
Interviews with Joel Osteen and George Lucas will be shown on the ! next two Sundays.