Forty years ago, daytime television changed.
On September 8, 1986, The Oprah Winfrey Show made its national debut. What followed was a 25-season run that transformed Oprah Winfrey into one of television’s most recognizable figures and turned a Chicago-based talk show into a global pop-culture phenomenon.
But the story had begun before the name Oprah was on television screens across the country.
Winfrey arrived in Chicago in 1984 to take over WLS-TV’s struggling morning program AM Chicago. The show quickly climbed in the ratings, and two years later Winfrey took the leap into national syndication. The Oprah Winfrey Show premiered nationally on September 8, 1986.
The Audition That Helped Start It All
For the show’s 40th anniversary, Winfrey has gone back to where her Chicago story began.
This week, she revisited footage from the audition that brought her to Chicago, sharing it through The Oprah Podcast. Winfrey recalled flying into a city she had never visited before and wanting the job immediately — despite admitting that she hadn’t prepared anything for the audition.
She also revisited the journal entry she wrote on the eve of the show’s first national broadcast and reflected on the enormous professional gamble she took when she chose not only to take the program national, but to pursue ownership of her work.
That gamble paid off.
Over the years, The Oprah Winfrey Show became much more than a daytime talk show. Celebrity interviews sat alongside conversations about relationships, health, books, social issues and the experiences of everyday people. Oprah’s recommendations could turn books into bestsellers and products into sensations, while individual episodes regularly became national conversations.
The show’s success also helped establish Chicago as a major television production center. Harpo eventually operated from its famous West Loop studios, where hundreds of people worked on the program during its height.
“Everybody Gets a Car!”
And then there were the moments that became part of pop culture.
Few are remembered more vividly than the opening of Season 19.
On September 13, 2004, Winfrey surprised her studio audience with brand-new Pontiac G6s. After initially presenting cars to several audience members, gift boxes containing keys were distributed throughout the studio.
The surprise: every one of the 276 audience members was getting a car.
The giveaway became one of the most famous moments in daytime television and spawned a pop-culture catchphrase that has endured for more than two decades. Pontiac supplied the vehicles as part of the promotion.
That moment turns 22 years old on September 13, 2026 — just five days after the show’s 40th anniversary.
25 Seasons Later
The Oprah Winfrey Show aired its final episode on May 25, 2011, bringing an extraordinary 25-season run to a close.
By then, what had begun as a struggling Chicago morning show had become something much larger. Winfrey had changed the daytime television landscape, built her own production company and created a platform capable of turning books into bestsellers, introducing new voices to millions of viewers and making ordinary conversations part of the national conversation.
The show’s influence didn’t disappear when the studio lights went down. Its interview style, celebrity moments, audience giveaways and deeply personal conversations helped shape much of the daytime television that followed.
Now, 40 years after The Oprah Winfrey Show first went national, Winfrey is revisiting the audition tape and journal entries from the days when she was still wondering where that opportunity in Chicago might lead.
She couldn’t have known then that the answer would be 25 seasons, thousands of episodes and one of the most influential television careers in history.
Forty years later, The Oprah Winfrey Show remains a defining chapter in American television and pop culture.
Featured photo: John Mathew Smith / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 2.0.Oprah Winfrey, 2011: INTX: The Internet & Television Expo / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY 2.0.
