It sounded like the kind of melodramatic confession guests make on her television talk show.
"I've been guilty of doing trash TV and not even thinking it was trash," Oprah Winfrey said in September on the eve of a new television season. "I don't want to do it anymore. I cannot listen to other people blaming their mothers for another year."
With those words, Ms. Winfrey, the grande dame of TV talk, effectively launched a national referendum. Did viewers want sharing and caring or did they prefer lurid and cheesy? The results are now in. In this fall's second electoral rout, grotesque and dysfunctional have won in a landslide.
While still the leader in daytime talk with an audience estimated at 9.4 million viewers a day, Oprah's ratings have taken a dramatic autumnal tumble, the apparent result of her shows on such shockingly mundane subjects as "Keeping a Child-Safe Home" and "Stopping Gossip." Meanwhile, the 14-month-old "Ricki Lake Show," driven by a youthful audience and more sensational topics, has soared to No. 2 among talk shows. The moral: Americans have not yet had their fill of fare such as "Surprise, I Want to Sleep With You," one of Ricki Lake's entries in the November "sweeps" ratings period.
"People might say they want high road, but then the ratings come out," said Melanie Morgan, vice president of the Earle Palmer Brown advertising agency in Bethesda. "That's not what they watched."
The topics of daytime talk might be so much ho-hum but for the stakes involved. Increasingly, local stations rely on talk shows as the backbone of their daytime programming. The shows attract many viewers and deliver audiences to local newscasts and even to network news shows. Oprah's experiment on the high road and Ricki Lake's shrewdly calculated ascent are events with multimillion-dollar implications for local broadcasters.
Ms. Winfrey's kinder and gentler program -- and its current decline -- are becoming the talk of talk television. Between October 1993 and October 1994, her national ratings fell 10 percent to 12 percent.
In Baltimore, where she was once an anchorwoman on WJZ-TV, (Channel 13,) the numbers were even worse, dropping 25 percent. In years past, "Oprah" meant $2 million in annual profits to WMAR-TV (Channel 2), which carries the show in Baltimore. Now, the station says it isn't making any money on the program.
Certainly, Ms. Winfrey is the victim of a crowded talk-show market, with 18 shows competing for attention -- three times as many as when she debuted in 1986. But no one doubts that her program is also suffering from the decision to be more sedate.
For example, Ms. Winfrey opened a recent episode by apologizing for a previous show in which she managed to get men and women in the studio audience "yelling and screaming (( at each other." Now, she said, she hoped to help men and women better understand their differences.
"Now, her shows are not obscene, but they're innocuous and boring," said Vicki Abt, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University and an uncompromising critic of talk shows who helped persuade Ms. Winfrey to moderate her program. "There's no doubt that "The Ricki Lake Show" is not boring."
A ratings bonanza
And there's no doubt that the 26-year-old Ms. Lake, an actress who has appeared in the films of Baltimore director John Waters, is benefiting from her more traditional talk format. During this sweeps period, she has had women declare their desire to have sex with unsuspecting male friends. She has done a show on "Daughters Who Date Older Men and Moms Who Can't Stop Them" and one on "Women Who Say 'I Had His Baby and He Kicked Me to the Curb.' "
Premiering in September 1993, "The Ricki Lake Show" has enjoyed dramatic growth. Its ratings have climbed 126 percent in the last year, and her audience is now estimated at 5.8 million viewers a day.
Among women between 18 and 49 -- the most desirable audience for advertisers -- the show beats the local newscasts in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. It is the same in Baltimore: "Ricki" beats WJZ's newscast with Sally Thorner and Richard Sher, and WMAR's with Stan Stovall and Mary Beth Marsden.
"We are thrilled by the way the show is doing," said Michael Schroeder, program and promotion manager at WBFF-TV (Channel 45), the station that carries Ricki Lake in Baltimore. "It was the biggest surprise of last year."
Ms. Lake, an admirer of Ms. Winfrey, 40, now trails only her role model and is comfortably ahead of staples such as "Geraldo," "Donahue" and "Sally Jessy Raphael."
Her show is like theirs, only more so. Gail Steinberg, a co-creator of the show, talks about "aging down" the talk show format to grab young viewers. That means younger guests, livelier graphics, hipper music. Above all, it means a faster pace.
"Donahue has six guests an hour, and they stay on stage for the whole show," said Ms. Steinberg. "We'll have several segments with a couple of different entries and an average of 14 guests. There's always something happening."
The topics are customized for a younger audience. "Instead of 'My Wife Dresses Too Sexy,' we might do a show on 'My Mom Dresses Too Sexy,' " Ms. Steinberg said.
She said the show is not "freakish" and that it has educational value, dealing with such topics as safe sex and abusive relationships.
She also asserts that "we really try to bring about some type of resolution to people's lives," often by interrupting the bickering Ms. Lake has orchestrated by bringing on a psychologist to provide instant advice.
'Pure voyeurism'
But "Ricki" also seems willing to do whatever it takes to win ratings.
Guests are sometimes ambushed on the air with hurtful or embarrassing revelations. On one episode this month -- titled "I Slept With Your Man, Please Forgive Me" -- a young woman who was onstage with her boyfriend was told that he had slept with her best friend. The friend then came on to ask forgiveness.
(Ms. Steinberg said guests are warned that they will be surprised. "We tell them it may be pleasant, it may be unpleasant.")
The show has also blurred the line between fact and fiction. Last year, Uriel and Jennifer Soto appeared on "Ricki" posing as married cousins who met at a family picnic and fell in love. A week before, they had been on "The Jerry Springer Show," where Uriel played a man who was mad at his wife for dressing too sexily. Before that, the couple appeared on "The Jenny Jones Show," which featured Uriel as a jealous husband.
The producers of "Ricki" say they never intentionally deceive their audience. They say they were duped by the Sotos and that they make every effort to check out the stories of their guests.
Ms. Steinberg said "The Ricki Lake Show" is the only talk show with a full-time lawyer verifying the stories of potential guests. The show also requires guests to sign statements acknowledging their liability if their stories are untrue.
As for the presentation of the guests on the shows, Ms. Steinberg, a former teacher, said the "Ricki" show does not treat people as spectacles. "The rule is that you don't bring people on to gawk at them," she said.
But even Ricki Lake's supervising producer, Stuart Krasnow, said all of the talk shows, including his, "are voyeurism pure and simple."
He may intend that remark to be uncritical, but Dr. Abt is nothing if not judgmental. "Anyone who does these shows is irresponsible," she said. "These shows do not uplift, educate or inform. Their job is to stay on the air, and that's all they care about. To do that, they are willing to put on garbage, to trivialize issues, to hand out homilies and platitudes. This is nothing but commerce, and everything else goes out the window."
'The high road'
If it is nothing but commerce, it is clear that the salacious and sensational are good business, and talk shows are not the only proof of that axiom. As Dr. Abt points out, "The O. J. Simpson case is almost irrelevant in terms of case law or precedent, yet it dominates the news."
Neither is local news immune to titillation. Last year, for example, WJZ used a "special report" on sado-masochism in Maryland during its late news to help win a key sweeps ratings victory.
Ms. Winfrey's recent experience strongly underscores the point for television executives that the unsavory sells.
"Unfortunately, that's the bad news," said Joe Lewin, vice president and general manager of WMAR, the Baltimore station that carries Ms. Winfrey's show. "People in the television industry could see what's happening with the shows as a lesson, and "Oprah's" ratings loss could keep anyone from ever trying the high road again."
The first to feel the impact of her ratings decline are local stations, which buy the rights to air "Oprah" in their markets from King World, a national syndicator.
In her glory days, owning rights to air "Oprah" meant as much as $2 million in annual profits for a station in a city the size of Baltimore. Those days are over, Mr. Lewin said.
"Her decline has reached the point where we're no longer making any money with 'Oprah,' " he said.
During the good times, "Oprah's" value wasn't simply her winning ratings during her time periods. Her show was so dominant that stations carrying her show at 4 p.m. -- as WMAR does -- usually also won the next two hours, a time period that generally consists of news programs.
Many television executives believe "Oprah's" coattails extended all the way to the network newscasts. They say one reason ABC's "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings" is the top-rated national evening newscast is that many big-city ABC affiliates bought rights to "Oprah" years ago.
"It's true, you didn't buy 'Oprah' just for 4 o'clock," said Mr. Lewin."You bought her for what she could do for you from 4 to 7 o'clock.
'A little courage'
Ms. Winfrey signaled the change in her show at the end of the summer when she made the circuit of network talk shows and national magazines to promise a more responsible program. To inaugurate the new era, she brought on Dr. Abt, who talked about TV talk's distorted image of American life.
In a "CBS This Morning" interview in September, she elaborated: "I dream of finding a new way of doing television that elevates us all. I really am tired of the crud. All it takes is a little courage. I'm willing to risk having people call it soft or having people say, 'Her show is slipping' when you drop a tenth of a point.'"
But Ms. Winfrey has dropped a lot more than that, and the shows are more than just soft. It often seems she is trying nothing short of deconstructing the genre.
While losing ratings, she has earned some praise.
"I applaud her for it," said Phil Stolz, vice president and general manager of WBAL-TV (Channel 11), which will begin airing "Oprah" in September.
"I think she's way ahead of the curve. She's very visionary in doing the kind of high-road shows she's doing." He is also confident that "Oprah" will still deliver a considerable audience for the local newscast his station plans to air at 5 p.m. starting in September.
Tim Bennett, president of Ms. Winfrey's production company, said there are ways other than just the October-to-October Nielsen ratings to gauge how the referendum is going, such as the 3,500 letters a week he said Ms. Winfrey receives congratulating her on the tone and style of this fall's shows.
"The bottom line is that we're thrilled with where we are," he said. "Our audience is still almost twice that of any of our competitors, and we're doing it with shows that are entertaining, engaging and informative."
In the end, actions speak louder than spin. There are already three "Ricki" clones in development for next season, starring Melissa Rivers (Joan's daughter), Tempestt Bledsoe (formerly of The Cosby Show") and Carnie Wilson (of the Wilson Phillips singing group).
Perhaps the clearest indication of how the new "Oprah" is doing comes from Erik Sorenson, a former CBS news executive producer who is developing a news and information show for CBS and Group W.
The program, which will debut in September and will air from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. opposite "Oprah" in many markets, is designed to deliver a news audience to 5 p.m. local newscasts the way "Oprah" has done over the years. In Baltimore, it will air on WJZ.
"'Oprah' is still the No. 1 show, but her dramatic falloff in ratings is absolutely central to the genesis of this show," Mr. Sorenson said of his new program. "It opens the door."