Cadenza
Oprah comes to heal, rubs us the wrong way
The show is based on the premise of teaching life lessons. Every episode of “Lifeclass” features a theme and a life coach. This episode featured Iyanla Vanzant, who will soon have her own show on the Oprah Winfrey Network.
The theme of this segment was to stop the pain. To set the tone, Winfrey shared a Vanzant quote with the viewing audience. The quote attempted to be inspirational:
“Until you heal the wounds of your past, you are going to bleed.”
The show then moved through a series of interviews and discussion among Winfrey, Vanzant and people they deemed to be in pain.
At best, the show felt banal. Winfrey and Vanzant spent the two-hour session asking a slew of unoriginal and, at times, insulting questions.
In one slot, Vanzant spoke with female inmates at a correctional facility in Indiana via Skype.
She asked one inmate, who was in jail for holding her cheating boyfriend’s co-workers hostage at gunpoint, what it felt like to wake each morning in jail.
“I feel like every day I wake up in a nightmare,” the woman responded.
The segment fell flat. It’s hard to stop the pain when you are stuck in jail, after all.
In another segment, the inspirational pair spoke with a woman with a 5-year-old, non-communicative son with autism, who stated that she sometimes wished she had never had him.
After no more than 10 minutes of conversation with the woman, Vanzant stated on live national television that the woman should consider giving him up to a family who could provide better care. Having spoken to her for such a short time, it seemed like an inappropriate remark.
Don’t get me wrong, the show did offer some interesting advice for coping with pain, depression and addiction. Vanzant spoke about the importance of letting go of your backstory when coping with pain. Still, the way Winfrey and Vanzant went about teaching these lessons seemed particularly exploitative.
The show was interspersed with plugs for other Oprah Winfrey Network shows, including Vanzant’s, making it seem like one big advertisement for the network.
Oprah herself asserts that the show tries to avoid voyeurism, but that’s really what it feels like. From a seat in the audience, you really feel like you are intruding on the guests’ lives.
Still, in terms of making a successful television show, voyeurism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Look at popular television shows including “16 and Pregnant” on MTV and “My Strange Obsession” on TLC. Exploitative shows have an audience, so this show may find one yet.