Watching Oprah
I watch a lot of Oprah nowadays - a pitfall of being a stay at home mommy I guess. On Thursday she was showing some recaps of her shows, funny episodes. One of the incidents was when she had her favorite things Christmas show but for this particular year the theme was, "being thrifty." Thus, unlike previous Oprah favorite things shows where the audience walks away with tons of free stuff, that year the audience was given tips on how to have a more frugal holiday season.
Oprah was showing this episode because of the audience reaction. The people in the crowd were in disbelief, seemed upset (this spend-thrift episode was in 2008 when America was really hit by the recession, so the theme seemed appropriate). Mind you, these audience members did not even know the subject of the show they were seeing until they got into their seats.
Flip back to present day and Oprah was saying how she felt bad that these audience members were upset, how they appeared to be duped...um what?!
What is she talking about? These people are that greedy that they went to Oprah's show with a sense of entitlement?! They saw that they were at Oprah's favorite things episode and therefore they OBVIOUSLY had to be getting lots of great goodies. What the heck?! Who do these people think they are?! You didn't even know the subject matter of the show before you got the tickets - so why do you think you deserve big ticket free stuff because you happen to get into the favorite things episode?! You should just be glad you got tickets to the Oprah show, sheesh!
This is the problem with America today, everyone thinks they are entitled to something - you are not!
The worse part of this whole story is that after showing that old show, Oprah proceeded to give each of that old episode audience members a gift pack (tracking them down and Fed-Ex'ing to each member a gift pack), because she felt bad for what happened to them three years ago. What?! No! They got to see Oprah, that is all they paid for. This abject consumerism drives me nuts!
posted by Virginia Gal @ 7:12 PM
3 Comments:
That's interesting. I think that' a nice example about the relative nature of how people feel they are doing. If they were just comparing themselves to people on an every-day show, they would feel fine about not getting anything. But they compared themselves to people on previous episodes of the give-away shows and felt cheated. So while I agree that people are too often entitled, it's also interesting that Oprah chose to play it that way since she's the one who set up the expectation. And I didn't realize people pay to be in the audience.
I think maybe people want a little magic in their lives when times are hard. They see Oprah, rightly or wrongly, as someone who can create it. Maybe a show about how to have a magical holiday despite hard times would have been better received.
I certainly don't think that Oprah owed the audience anything. By sending out gifts, maybe Oprah was recognizing that a little bit of serendipity in hard times is encouraging.
Secret Agent - whoops you are right, they don't pay to get in.
Merci - you are so good at seeing the silver lining!
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