Parade Magazine is one of the most woeful publications, all sandwiched into your Sunday paper like some moldy, stinky fish. Newspapers as a rule are predisposed towards the geriatric crowd, so it’s hard to get excited about the magazine when they put a bunch of old people on the cover, your latest adoption crazed celebrity, “texting shorthand from your kids”, or, recently, Gayle King.
What’s humorous about the Gayle King placement is that it leads you to believe that she’ll be getting a generous spread amongst the pages as per Parade‘s wont, highlighting…something Oprah related. Gayle King’s kind of only known for that one thing: being Oprah’s “friend”. Her profile is just as interesting as that sounds, and it’s only a few paragraphs long, is a poorly veiled press release and half of which is already pretty well known.
It’s with that notion that I wonder why Parade chose to put Gayle King on their cover and not something else? I get it, it’s the first issue of the year, and presumably no one cares, but really Gayle King? Even more insulting is the box at the end of the article that tells the reader “Hey, go to our website where Gayle King tells how her and Oprah are different and other stuff!” Why not put it in your fucking magazine, Parade?!
CBS is rebooting it’s lagging ass morning show, again. It seems to be the bi-annual ritual at the network to fire every single person that was supposed to be the “New, Hot, Fresh, Air” thing to blow through the morning news circuit. Let’s face facts CBS: No one is ever going to beat The Today Show. My mother works at a nursing home and they just put The Today Show on as background noise in the common areas. It is, presumably, the leading background noise news program! You don’t have to follow along very hard, 86% of the show is geared towards old people, and they still manage to squeeze in a tiny droplet of “real news”. It’s pretty ladies, and gentleman flapping their faces and making familiar buzzing noises to comfort old people. I imagine it’s what a baby’s life is like at their opening moments of its life.
Gayle King’s article, from which I assume Parade is part of the CBS corporate machine, kind of reads like a news release from a public relations firm. “[CBS This Morning]…is meant to be a harder-hitting, less frivolous take on the days’ stories than its network competitors.” …Meow! Is that shot across the bow or what? Add to it “gravitas” of a Charlie Rose and the “pretty young thing” Erica Hill, and you have (sigh) another insipid The Today Show clone. Except that it’s not, according the King: “…Charlie will drive the first hour…I’ll be driving the second, which will definitely be geared toward women (aka well worn Oprah territory). Erica will be on both. How it opens on day one will not be how it looks on day sever. Everything takes a hot minute to gel.” So inconsistency notwithstanding, how is it actually going to set itself aside from the same formula that’s the foundation of every single morning show on television? From CBS’s previous morning show track record, I don’t even think they’ll give this show more than a hot minute to get it’s act together, or at the very least compete against the #2 rated morning news show.
Television executives have to get over their collective Oprah hangover. Even Oprah’s not finding much success with her own television network in the harsh recesses of deep cable. Where she is literally doing the same shit she was doing on daytime TV for twenty odd years. Yes, the middle-aged woman demographic is not to be trifled. But as we’ve learned with the shuttering of well established daytime soap operas these past few years, tastes aren’t what they used to be. The new middle aged woman is not an Oprahphile and possibly dejects the monarchical hold that Oprah wields with their mothers and grandmothers. At least, that’s what I think.
Anyone who caught the tail end of Oprah’s last remaining programs; and how could you miss it, her shows schedule painstakingly mapping out ever bit of minutia of that May month, could see that the vapidity and sheer effervescence of any real impact on display. It made me wonder why Oprah waited so long to strike out on her own as a mythical beast. Granted, she’s a mainstay of the daytime television schedule, but her prime was long ago. It had to be the ego after the ascension that made her believe that an ENTIRE network dedicated to her was a good idea. Marketers and advertisers foaming at the mouth, convincing her of the even bigger cash cow if she could get OWN up and running, filling it’s programming hours with all the extra Oprah fueled bullshit that steered the good ship Oprah for three decades. A quest for immortality!
After CBS shutters this new morning show and sends Gayle King back to the Oprah petting zoo, it should be clear that the Oprah brand just isn’t as powerful as it was even two years ago. Hiring a cheaper proxy Oprah in Gayle King isn’t going to do anything for them. It’s a valiant effort on the #1 Rated New Series Network to go even more geriatric focused with it’s morning show, especially after going the “a rainbow skinned group of people shitting television sunshine at your wrinkled face” route in the years prior.
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