Oprah at TCA: “Until now I never allowed TV in my house!”

Ed Martin Live from TCA - "Special from Jack Myers Media Business Report"

I’ve been covering TCA tours for twenty-two years now and I have never experienced anything quite like Oprah Winfrey’s appearance yesterday on behalf of her brand new cable network, OWN.

You could feel the excitement building throughout the day here at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, site of the 2011 Winter Television Critics Association tour. Winfrey, arguably the biggest star and most influential person working in television, hadn’t hit a TCA since January 2005, when she appeared (along with Halle Berry) to promote the ABC television movieOprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God, for which she served as executive producer. Longtime TCA members couldn’t recall any appearances she might have made before that one.

The 2011 TCA Oprah Experience proved to be a one of a kind event -- an unprecedented mix of arch formality (all TCA members had to secure special badges to attend the party that followed Oprah’s press conference) and disarmingly informal communication. For example, there was a sense of great seriousness surrounding all things Oprah before the sessions for OWN actually began, but that didn’t stop her from casually moving about the lobby outside the hotel ballroom, chatting with critics and reporters who weren’t inside attending other Discovery Networks panels at the time. (Those panels included one for Taking on Tyson, a six-part Animal Planet documentary set to premiere in March about the entry of boxing legend Mike Tyson into the world of pigeon racing, and one for the Science Channel travel special An Idiot Abroad, featuring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington, set to debut January 22.)

I had my own informal Oprah Moment as she was leaving the party that followed her press conference. After being asked to step aside by the special security guards who were on hand so that she might have a clear path for her departure, I managed to say “Goodbye, Oprah” as she passed by me.

She stopped, turned to me and responded, “Don’t party too much.”

“I can’t,” I replied. “I have to go back to my room and write a column about you.”

Oprah turned and continued to walk away, then stopped, took a few steps back in my direction, smiled and said, “Maybe you should have a couple of drinks before you write about me!”

And then she was gone. I’ve talked to dozens of network chiefs during the last two decades, but this exchange was something altogether different. It was a moment with Mother Oprah, a name Winfrey had affectionately been given a couple hours earlier by one of the finalists on her network’s first competition reality series, Your Own Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star.

There had, in fact, been a little bit of tension in the air earlier when Oprah first took the stage, which prompted her to joke, “This is like being thrown to the wolves.”

Then came the first question, which set off waves of laughter. “I was just wondering,” one reporter asked, “Are we all going to get cars?”

“I should have brought you all something,” Oprah lamented.

As it progressed, the session became more intimate than any other with a major media executive that I can recall during my two decades covering TCA tours. Oprah talked about growing up poor in a small town in Mississippi; about the flood of memories of her late grandmother that washed over her as she watched the opening hours of OWN on January 1; about how she would watch television on sets at the local Sears Roebuck store and beg her grandmother for a TV, only to be told TV “was the devil’s work.”

Oprah talked about her grandmother at length. “The only dream my grandmother had for me was, ‘I hope you grow up and get some good white folks,’” she revealed. “Her dream was that I would be able to have a family like she had that would give [her] clothes and let [her] take food home.” As she watched herself introduce OWN when the network signed on, Oprah thought that her grandmother “wouldn’t even know what this is. Yet I feel the spirit of her and I feel the spirit of every single person who came before me and made it possible for me to sit here today.”

At one point Oprah, who certainly likes to talk, responded to a question with an answer that many critics estimated ran more than fifteen minutes. Many of them took to Twitter to silently alert the outside world about the Oprah Filibuster, as her lengthy response immediately became known. (In a particularly telling turn, many critics applauded when Oprah finally stopped talking. I think she thought they were expressing their appreciation for what she had said. In reality, many were snidely expressing gratitude that she had finally finished.)

Oprah talked a lot about the energy people give off, and how they should take responsibility for the energy they bring into a room, negative, positive or otherwise. Then she spoke about the energy of television. “I’m very much aware of the energy that television is transmitting all the time,” she said. “Until now I never allowed it in my house unless there was something specific I wanted to see. I want to control the energy coming into my space. The intention of this channel is to bring good energy.”