Does Oprah Winfrey Miss Her Daytime Talk Show? Here’s What She Told Kelly Ripa…

Oprah Winfrey‘s iconic daytime talk show propelled her to worldwide fame. But would she ever consider bringing the show back? The TV titan has been opening up about it.

On the Wednesday, July 16, episode of her Let’s Talk Off Camera podcast, Kelly Ripa said The Oprah Winfrey Show would still be on air in her “fantasy world.” She gushed, “I feel like if somebody could get us through the dark times that we currently seem to be stuck in, it would be you sort of guiding us.”

Despite Ripa’s kind comments, Winfrey noted, “I don’t miss the show. … I miss the connection to the audience. I miss the everyday conversation. I miss the conversations afterwards.”

The Oprah Winfrey Show ran for 25 seasons from 1986 to 2011. Winfrey went on to share a memory from the show’s final season that doesn’t make her miss the hustle and bustle of daytime TV.

“That last year, we took an entire audience to Australia. ‘You are going to Australia!’ And then, what we didn’t realize is that 90 percent of the audience didn’t have a passport,” she revealed. “So the producers were, like, out of their minds trying to get passports for the people in time for the show in Australia.”

© King World Productions/courtesy Everett Collection

Looking to “outdo” themselves after the Australia episodes, Winfrey said one producer suggested they “try to get people on a spaceship or we should be able to take an audience or some audience members up on a spaceship.” Winfrey joked, “I was like, ‘It is time to bring it down.'”

Elsewhere in her conversation with Ripa, Winfrey said that her eponymous talk show remains the “love of my life,” stating, “I think of it always with a sense of reverence because of the audience. You know this every day, the connection to the audience. And I think about all the lives that were touched and changed by that show. And I’m reminded of it every single day.”

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As for when she knew it was time to say goodbye to the series, Winfrey shared, “As much as I loved being on a part of the show every day, and as much as I loved the audience, I’m telling you, the nature of what we were doing every day became just so hard to [do].”

As Ripa pointed out, Winfrey frequently dove into “very serious topics” on her show. Winfrey agreed, adding, “You’re doing cancer patients and people who’ve divorced, and every major dysfunction in the world, we have discussed.”

Winfrey also noted that she pulled herself out of the running for the Emmys “after the first eight or nine years” because “the producers would be overwhelmed when we lost.” She continued: “I just thought, ‘[It’s] not even worth that,’ because you know you’re doing the best work possible. You know you’re putting out the effort to do good things, to be a force for good in the world. And it’s not going to be measured by an award at the end of the year. It’s measured in every viewer response. … It’s measured in all the lives that are being affected by what you’re doing and saying.”