ABSTRACT
On September 11 and 12, 2001, for the first time in its fifteen-year run, The Oprah Winfrey Show was cancelled. The talk show resumed its daily broadcast on September 13 with an episode aptly entitled “America under Attack,” which was repeated the next day. The cancellation of Oprah! (as the talk show is most commonly referred to) fit the state of confusion that American television found itself in right after the terrorist attacks. On the one hand, 9/11 was a television event. From the moment the first plane hit the Twin Towers, millions of viewers around the world stayed glued to their television sets to capture the latest news and to relive the moment again and again. Yet, on the other hand, the flow of American television had been interrupted, as its regular programming was replaced by nonstop commercial-free news coverage and other “appropriate” content. As Lynn Spigel has shown, American television needed just a little time to regain its balance between public service and commercial interest, quickly returning to the programming that “channeled the nation back to normalcy – or at least to the normal flows of television and commercial culture.” 1 Within two weeks after 9/11, Oprah! too returned to normalcy, with an episode of “Oprah’s Book Club” (24 September 2001) and, four days later, an episode on “What Parents Should Know about Ecstasy” (28 September 2001).
