As I’ve written here before, you can expect to see Oprah back on broadcast TV by 2015—at the latest. OWN is bleeding money at an unsustainable rate, and the folks at Discovery (which ins underwriting the venture) are facing a critical choice. Keep throwing massive sums of money at a network with a dwindling audience, or pull the plug, and endure a p.r. nightmare as the outfit that “fired Oprah.”
As a reformed broadcaster, I can tell you exactly what Discovery will do. They will continue the down-sizing; Rosie will get the axe around the end of the year; there will be a rush to cheaper programming and “The Queen” will either resign (or be forced out) in a couple of years—at the latest.
And for what it’s worth, Oprah won’t be welcomed back to broadcast TV with open arms. Her audience was in decline for years before she signed off, and there are lots of cheaper programming options to fill the mid-morning or mid-afternoon time slots.
They should choose to move Rosie to a more natural environment: Animal Planet.