Oprah's Dr. Phil antidote

Winfrey company shops syndication deal for Dr. Oz

BY PHIL ROSENTHAL | Chicago Tribune

April 22, 2008

Dr. Mehmet Oz has become Oprah WinfreyÂs on-air go-to health-and-wellness guy. (Handout)

While onetime protege Dr. Phil McGraw is becoming something of an embarrassment with his tabloidesque plays for ratings, talk-show empress Oprah Winfrey's company is shopping another doctor show to syndicators.

The 2009 project for Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon who heads the cardiovascular program at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and has become Winfrey's on-air go-to health-and-wellness guy, potentially would go head-to-head with "The Doctors," a show featuring five medical experts that CBS Television Distribution plans to launch this fall. Notably, among the executive producers of "The Doctors" are Dr. Phil and Jay McGraw, his son.

While sources say just about anyone capable of stringing together an ad hoc network of a few dozen stations is pitching Winfrey's Harpo Productions to syndicate the Oz show, a spokesman for Harpo said last week that the company has nothing to announce and would not confirm the process.

Assuming the Oz spinoff gets greenlighted, CBS TV Distribution, which distributes Winfrey's talk show, still could wind up syndicating it, selling it to stations, peddling national ad spots and helping produce the program the way it does for Winfrey's earlier spin-offs, "Dr. Phil" and "Rachael Ray."

Winfrey actually shopped "Dr. Phil" around before settling in with CBS. But one important difference this time is the death late last year of Roger King, who took Winfrey's show national in 1986 with King World, now part of CBS. To whatever extent loyalty has played a factor, she may be as concerned as ever with ensuring she strikes the best deal.

Besides, it's not as though CBS is the only TV outfit that can claim ties to Winfrey and Oz, who has done shows for Winfrey's XM Satellite Radio channel and cable's Discovery Channel, whose parent is partnering with Winfrey on an Oprah cable network that likely will get reruns of an Oz show.

News Corp.'s HarperCol-

lins publishes Oz's "You: The Owners' Manual," which might give an in to its Twentieth Television syndication arm. And Disney-ABC Domestic Television is buoyed by how many Walt Disney Co.-owned major-market stations, including WABC/7, air Winfrey's show. ABC is also home to Harpo's made-for-TV movies and prime-time ventures, such as "Oprah's Big Give."

Frankly, it would be completely understandable if Winfrey wanted to take Dr. Phil down a peg, given his recent missteps on the side of poor taste and worse judgment.

McGraw's latest public gaffe involved scrapping a planned show about the YouTube girl-on-girl beating because of outrage that one of his staffers had paid $3,200 to bail out one of the teens accused in the case so she could be on the program. Earlier, he aborted a show focused on Britney Spears' troubles after criticism of his hospital confrontation of her.

It's not as though Winfrey is afraid to dabble in the seamy. She scored a 45 percent ratings surge from a week earlier with her April 3 show featuring Thomas Beatie, the transgendered person who underwent a partial sex change and is now known as the pregnant man.

But bailing someone out of jail for exclusive interview rights or compromising a hospital patient's privacy is the sort of thing that Dr. Phil would be loudly protesting if he weren't party to it.

No wonder Winfrey thinks daytime TV needs a second opinion.