Oprah Winfrey talks about giving Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz their big breaks
For almost 40 years, a stamp of approval from Oprah Winfrey has been the ultimate status symbol, and a near-guarantee of commercial success — just ask Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil.
Winfrey’s talk show launched in 1986 and became a sensation. The talk show raked in Daytime Emmy awards, and the host’s sway with the audience was undeniable. Winfrey’s influence was, and still is, so potent that marketing pros called the boost in sales following an endorsement “the Oprah Effect.” Books have shot to the top of bestseller lists, brands such as Spanx and Ugg have become household names and multiple television personalities have been launched, including two controversial health professionals whose endorsements from Winfrey haven’t exactly aged well for some fans.
During a recent interview with the Television Academy’s Emmy Magazine, Winfrey addressed her ties with the conservative TV personalities, saying “People criticize me for Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz, because of their politics or their views.”
In the ’90s, Phil McGraw was a licensed psychologist who co-founded a trial consulting firm and was hired to help Winfrey when she was sued in Texas for questioning the safety of beef on her show amid a mad cow disease epidemic happening in the U.K. According to disgruntled cattlemen, the “Oprah Effect” doesn’t just have the power to boost sales, it can drop them too.
Winfrey won the case in 1998, and was so impressed by McGraw that she invited him onto her show and he subsequently landed a weekly segment. A few years later, he launched his own talk show with Winfrey’s backing.
“Dr. Phil, he was so practical, so down to earth, so real. And he would ride in the car with me every morning on the way to trial, where I’m literally sitting on trial for six weeks. I felt that he was so instrumental in helping me. I thought, ‘Oh, you could help a lot of people. You should come on my show,’” she told the outlet.
Dr. Oz came into the fold, Winfrey said, by way of introduction from her best friend, fellow television personality and news anchor Gayle King.
“He explained practical things like colon cancer and bowel movements,” Winfrey told Emmy Magazine. “I thought he had the language for explaining medical things in a way that was helpful to me. I thought it would be helpful to many other people. And that is how they ended up on the show.”
Dr. Mehmet Oz made his debut on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2004, and in the next few years he made more than 60 appearances, offering health advice to viewers. In 2009, he followed in Dr. Phil’s footsteps and launched his own talk show, with Winfrey’s production company backing the venture.
In recent years, Dr. Phil has aligned himself with MAGA, and in October 2024 he spoke at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden presidential campaign rally. Last year, he embedded with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials during raids, including in Chicago, where he and his crew taped arrests.
In 2020, when Dr. Phil celebrated a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he thanked Winfrey in his speech, saying she has mentored him and moved him forward in life. “No doubt about it… You cannot understand the power of the O factor,” he said. “There would be no Dr. Phil without Oprah, so blame her if you’re going to blame somebody.”
Similarly, Dr. Oz aligned himself with the MAGA and Make America Healthy Again movements. He ran for senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 with an endorsement from Trump. After losing, he joined the Trump administration as the administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Since McGraw and Oz became vocal allies of the Trump administration, news stories involving them have spawned a thread of replies and reposts with comments pointing the finger at Winfrey for platforming the men many moons ago.
“Oprah spun off Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, and gave oxygen to Suzanne Somers’ and Jenny McCarthy’s toxic messages. Her impact on the public discourse around medical advice was pretty uniformly terrible. I am not a fan,” reads one post on X.
“If it weren’t for Oprah, this quack Dr. Phil would be a nobody. Oprah has a lot to answer for,” reads another.
And, “Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz are the two worst things Oprah ever foisted on the public.”
Winfrey may have platformed the men decades ago, but her stance is clear today: “Everybody has their own path in life, and it has not one thing to do with me, and I don’t have one thing to do with them. At the time, the reason and intention behind me giving them their breaks was I thought they had valuable information to share that had been meaningful to me.”
