Forty-eight hours after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, producers from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” were sitting inside the home of a flight attendant who had been called into work that morning. She had kissed her young children goodbye before leaving, then she boarded one of the planes that crashed.
Back at Harpo Studios in Chicago, longtime “Oprah” producer Katy Davis watched the footage her colleagues brought back from the family's home.
“I just remember that was one of the only times I was literally crying in my office, just watching this tape and doing this work,” Davis recalls.
In the following days and weeks, millions of Americans were watching the same horrific images, grappling with their grief and lingering questions about the state of the world.
Inside Harpo, Davis' teams began trying to make sense of those larger questions Americans were confronting in a way that only Oprah and her team could.
“How do we help with the healing process?” Davis recalls. "How do we be a part of that?”
“The Oprah Winfrey Show” began its nationally syndicated run 40 years ago, and today its legacy extends far beyond daytime television. Across 25 seasons, Winfrey and her producers helped reshape what Americans expected from a talk show, moving between celebrity interviews and deeply personal conversations about abuse, race, grief, relationships and mental health.
While the questions, and topics, changed constantly inside Harpo Studios, the process did not. Behind every episode – about 170 every year, for 25 years, or roughly 4,250 total episodes – there was one simple question: Why are we telling this story? What could viewers learn from it?
The answer and the intention behind it – that television could entertain millions while helping viewers recognize themselves in someone else – became a blueprint that can still be seen everywhere from daytime TV to podcasts and the intensely personal way people tell their stories online.
Three longtime senior producers on “The Oprah Show” spoke to USA TODAY about what it was like to work on the legendary daytime talk show behind the scenes, detailing how stories were found and shaped, the lengths producers went to book guests and get a show on the air, and the conversations inside Harpo that determined what millions of viewers would ultimately see.
“The Oprah Winfrey Show” ended in 2011, but the kind of conversation it helped normalize didn’t. Today, celebrities spend hours on podcasts discussing their childhoods, relationships, trauma and mistakes, while strangers share intensely personal experiences with millions on TikTok – a culture of public vulnerability that bears Oprah’s influence.
“When you watch a podcast and someone is talking about an ‘aha moment,’ or they’re talking about thinking about something in a different way or thinking about something deeply, I credit that all with her,” producer Jenna Kostelnik Utley says. “Every podcast that comes out, every commercial you watch, there’s language about seeing yourself in someone else and the connected thread and all of that. For me, that’s all [Oprah].”
What Oprah was like as a producer behind the scenes
When “The Oprah Winfrey Show” premiered nationally in 1986, daytime television looked different. Talk shows were competing for viewers with provocative subjects, emotional confrontations and increasingly sensational stories. But Winfrey and her producers didn’t want to follow the formula of the shows around them. They wanted to carve out their own lane – one that could still tackle provocative subjects, but with purpose.
A story couldn’t simply be surprising, outrageous or emotional to make it on the show. “It wasn’t enough for Oprah for it to be shock and awe. How is this going to make people’s lives better to talk to this person with this story?” recalls producer Jill Van Lokren. “Everything starts with an intention. Why should we be telling this story?” she says.
Producers were encouraged to look beyond the spectacle and ask what a viewer sitting at home might take away from it – whether that was a lesson, a warning, a new perspective or simply the recognition of their own experience in someone else’s.
As the show grew into a cultural phenomenon, Winfrey didn't retreat from the process of making it.
“As big as the show got and as famous as she became, she never removed herself from the storytelling,” Kostelnik Utley says. “I really feel like that’s part of her secret sauce.”
Producers were expected to arrive at meetings prepared, and Winfrey didn’t shy away from dismissing ideas outright if they weren’t up to par. But producers say if Winfrey could feel how strongly the producer believed in an idea, she would encourage them to see it through.
“She was tough, but she was fair,” Van Lokren recalls.
When it came to working on scripts for each episode, the producers say nothing was sacred. “There was an expectation that you came in with your very, very best, but you also didn’t own the idea,” Kostelnik Utley says. “A script is a living, breathing thing. The only way to make it better is if everybody touches it.”
Winfrey was deeply involved, bringing her own thoughts, questions, and perspective to each episode. Van Lokren remembers Winfrey arriving before producers in the morning and sometimes staying after they left. One of Winfrey's most consequential skills, Kostelnik Utley says, is her ability to listen to both her subjects and her colleagues around her.
“It’s called a talk show, but what she really knew intrinsically is that her role is to listen and then reflect back the questions that she knows everyone in their kitchens wants to ask,” Kostelnik Utley says.
Inside Harpo: How the Oprah machine worked
Kostelnik Utley arrived at Harpo Studios in 1997 as a production assistant. “You would walk into the building and there was just an energy in there that I can’t describe,” Kostelnik Utley says. “There was an intoxicating creative energy where you knew: You’re either built for this, or this is going to be really hard.” She immediately knew she was the former.
Part of her first job at the show was logging Winfrey's interviews, putting a VHS tape into a machine and transcribing what was said.
“I learned how to write from that,” she said. “I learned how she asked questions. I learned what an interview guest would respond to and what they didn’t.”
Being a PA meant observing how everything worked: how guests entered the building, how they were treated, what made someone comfortable, and how a conversation ultimately became television.
Eventually, Kostelnik Utley became a senior producer herself. She worked on roughly 10-day production cycles, developing a new episode every 10 days. A team could pitch 25 ideas and see only one advance. Occasionally, a producer was handed a major celebrity.
Most days, she says, “you were in there cranking out ideas.”
Van Lokren arrived at “Oprah” in 1996 after working at “Sally Jessy Raphael” and “The Maury Povich Show.” By the end of the show's run, she was a senior supervising producer overseeing several production teams and scripts, and says every episode began as “a blank piece of paper.”
“We didn’t [have] social media, no internet, all the things,” Van Lokren said. “I sometimes wonder how we did it.”
In order to find compelling subjects, producers called 411 and tracked down neighbors, sometimes even asking a neighbor to physically put a letter into the mailbox of the person they hoped to book.
“We would just bond on a human level,” Van Lokren said. “I would ask questions; they would share their story.”
Before a guest trusted Oprah, they first had to trust the stranger calling from Harpo.
“People wanted to share their story,” Van Lokren said.
How Oprah changed the celebrity interview
If a celebrity had already sat down with another show, Davis said, “Oprah” producers weren't necessarily worried; they knew Winfrey's interview would be different. According to producers, the talk show host did, and still does, has an uncanny ability to disarm her subjects and make people feel comfortable.
“We knew it would be a different interview and that people would get something from our show that they weren’t getting from any other show because of Oprah, her insights and questions,” she says.
Not to mention, the show was based in Chicago rather than Los Angeles or New York where the majority of the entertainment industry existed back then. Producers say “coming to “Oprah” meant literally coming to Oprah, which became part of the show’s magic.
“You had to fly to Chicago, and it was a whole experience,” Van Lokren says. “That magical experience I have yet to see be recreated.”
Producers thought about that experience from the moment a guest walked into Harpo until they left. A celebrity interview could consume an entire hour instead of a brief promotional segment, and sometimes the result became television history for reasons nobody could predict.
Van Lokren says she worked on the “iconic” episode of “Oprah” in which Tom Cruise jumped on the couch on stage declaring his love for Katie Holmes. She remembers the couple being “very cute backstage,” and that Cruise was “quite possibly the nicest person I’ve ever come across.”
“He's as kind to the person who greets him at the door as he is to Oprah,” Van Lokren says. “You don't forget people like that. Whatever else is going on, he really seemed like a kind human being.”
At the time, though, Van Lokren says the staff had no idea they were witnessing a moment that would become part of pop culture history.
“When he jumped, we were all back in the control room like, ‘Was that cute or was that weird?’” she recalls. “Obviously, we couldn't have predicted what it would become.” Looking back, she says moments like that are part of what made working on “Oprah” so singular.
“Because of Oprah, I feel like I've gotten to touch history in all the ways.”
But the show's celebrity interviews weren't only valuable when they produced a viral-before-things-went-viral moment. Davis points to Winfrey's interview with Nelson Mandela, explaining that Winfrey listened to him discuss reconciliation rather than revenge, then translated that idea into the life of the person watching from home.
Davis says the impact of “The Oprah Show” was a viewer hearing her interview with Mandela and applying it to their own lives, and maybe even feeling inspired to let go of their own resentments.
“Oprah had a global voice,” Davis says. “We heard from people all over the world whose lives were changed.”
How ‘Oprah’ took on the stories people weren't talking about
The same philosophy became more consequential when the person sitting across from Winfrey wasn't there to promote a movie or book.
For a period of time, Kostelnik Utley’s team worked on a series called “Why Are These Child Killers Out of Prison?” and one story took her to Pennsylvania, where she reported on the abuse of a little boy named PJ.
“I had never seen or heard of a story like that,” Kostelnik Utley says. “I just will never forget it.”
Producing the episode raised a question more complicated than whether people would watch. “The challenge was to figure out how to tell that story without being exploitative and to make it really in honor of that little boy, that his life mattered,” Kostelnik Utley says.
The show repeatedly covered issues that were rarely discussed publicly.
Davis remembers reading Mackenzie Phillips' memoir while on vacation and reaching Phillips' disclosure of an incestuous relationship with her father, John Phillips.
After Phillips appeared on “Oprah,” viewers began writing to say similar things had happened inside their own families. Kostelnik Utley believes that one of the show's most important functions was how it brought subjects to light that had previously been shunned by society.
Abuse, divorce, or even postpartum struggles: “She helped give a language to things that were happening in people’s lives that they didn’t understand,” she says.
Davis also remembers an episode that brought surviving members of the Little Rock Nine together with some of the people who had tormented them as they integrated Central High School in Arkansas back in 1957.
“It was really one of the most profound and moving shows that I still remember,” Davis said. “What a beautiful lesson in forgiveness and in grace.”
Inside Oprah’s Favorite Things
The same production team that tackled child abuse, racism, and grief also had another mandate: Bring people joy. That led to the iconic “Oprah’s Favorite Things” episodes.
For viewers, the premise seemed simple: Winfrey revealed things she loved and the audience learned they were bringing those items home with them, screaming with joy and jumping out of their seats. Behind the scenes, though, producers spent much of the year preparing for that reaction. Kostelnik Utley worked on 14 “Favorite Things” episodes. Planning could begin as early as the spring for a show that taped in November.
Ideas came from everywhere, including companies submitting products and producers pitching their own discoveries. Staffers sampled cakes, cookies and other foods sent to Harpo, and of course Winfrey herself was constantly finding things herself.
“She would go on vacation and be like, ‘Oh my God, I found these flip-flops. These are the best flip-flops,’” Kostelnik Utley recalls.
Getting Winfrey's approval was only the beginning. Producers had to determine whether a company could survive the Oprah effect. Could its website withstand the traffic? Did it have enough inventory? Could it handle the orders?
Some years, producers deliberately filled the seats with groups they wanted to celebrate — teachers, members of the military, EMTs or nurses — considering what was happening in the country and who might particularly deserve an hour of joy.
“How are we going to trick everybody this year?” Kostelnik Utley remembers Oprah asking. “What are we going to do? How are we going to make it the hottest ticket in town? How are we going to reveal it? What’s the set going to look like?”
They were also working in the shadow of one of the show's most famous moments, like Winfrey giving an entire studio audience new cars.
“You can’t top it,” Kostelnik Utley says. “So don’t try to top it. Do something different. Do something memorable.”
Reckoning with the people ‘Oprah’ put on the map
Long before Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz became television personalities in their own right, both were introduced to millions of viewers through “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” In the years since, their public personas and careers have evolved, including their involvement in politics; Oz now serves as administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the Trump administration.
Winfrey has faced criticism for giving both men a national platform, which she addressed in an August interview with Emmy Magazine.
"Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them," Winfrey said. "At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me."
Van Lokren tells USA TODAY that Winfrey has platformed countless people over the show’s 25-year run, many of whom remain beloved by viewers; McGraw and Oz are two examples whose legacies have become more complicated with time. But when they first appeared on “Oprah,” she says, both “met a moment that we were in.”
“With Dr. Oz, he was really able to explain a lot of things going on with our bodies that were never talked about. I think he helped make a lot of sense of that,” Van Lokren says. McGraw similarly entered Winfrey’s orbit at a moment when she needed someone to help her navigate a difficult experience. “He made sense of something that I'm sure was hard to make sense of,” she says. “He tells it like it is, and I think people responded to that.”
Looking at their trajectories now, however, Van Lokren sees a disconnect between what originally made the men a fit for “Oprah” and the public figures they eventually became. “It does not seem like where they are now is an extension of how it started,” she says. “When I look at it now as just a person in society on the outside world, they don't make as much sense to me. From where I sit, it looks like they strayed from their original reasoning and intentions.”
The show’s real impact: ‘My daughter is here because of “The Oprah Show”’
The influence of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” can be measured in ratings, awards, and the industries touched by Winfrey's endorsement. But the people who made it tend to talk about people.
Van Lokren thinks the stories on “Oprah” allowed viewers to arrive at one of two realizations. Recognition – “I’m going through it, and I’m not the only one” – and empathy: “I can’t believe people have to go through that. I see that in a whole new way, and I have a lot of compassion for it.”
For Davis, the show's legacy exists in the “macro and the micro.” Winfrey could interview Mandela and turn a conversation about reconciliation into a question about resentments in a viewer's own life, or she could respond to 9/11 while asking Americans to understand people different from themselves.
Kostelnik Utley didn't fully understand how literal the show's impact on its viewers could be until years after “Oprah” ended, when she was at a dinner and met a mother and her daughter.
“My daughter is here because of ‘The Oprah Show,’” the woman told her, explaining that she had been single and never married when she watched an episode of “Oprah” about in vitro fertilization and surrogacy.
“It opened my eyes to the fact that just because I wasn’t married, I could still have a baby,” Kostelnik Utley remembers her saying.
For 25 seasons, the people inside Harpo logged interviews, researched subjects, and tracked down celebrities as well as ordinary people, in order to create television programming that made an impact. Underneath all of it was the question they kept asking themselves: Why are we telling this story? Sometimes, they didn't learn the answer until decades later.
“Here’s this human being who exists because of that conversation,” Kostelnik Utley says. “To me, that’s the legacy. There are actual human beings living their lives differently because they watched the show.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How 'Oprah' reshaped TV, from celebrity interviews to hard truths
