Parade Magazine has a new extensive interview with Oprah ahead of the launch of Oprah’s OWN Network in January 2011. Oprah comes off as less sanctimonious than I often find her, although she does talk about how much more personally enriching we will find her new network as compared to most of the crap that’s on TV. She could be right.

In this age of everything on demand I would bet that Oprah and her people are making a huge mistake and will completely fail to offer content online. You can’t get the Oprah show on Hulu or iTunes and ten to one you won’t be able to get OWN shows if you don’t get that network either. (The Oprah show and OWN don’t even offer embeddable versions of promotional videos or clips.) Oprah runs everything and she operates on her own assumptions about making money through technology. When people on her Oprah.com message boards ask to watch the show online, her staff tells them to order transcripts, which cost $24.95 and contain no videos. Oprah isn’t about to sell shows for the $1.99 going rate on iTunes.

Anyway here’s what Oprah says about how she feels omnipotent and is adding so much to our society with her newest venture. She also admits that it was her idea to give Duchess Sarah Ferguson a reality show after the bribery scandal. Fail! Maybe if she paid more attention to popular trash TV she would realize that no one is interested in Fergie.

What’s OWN about?
It is mindful television. I think so much of television is a minefield that just zaps your energy, wastes your time. What I want to do is build a channel that is a respite for your mind, an oasis of stimulation, that you come away from with little pieces of light. I’m aiming for a moment where somebody could say, “I never thought of it that way before.” I just love that.

How many of the shows are your idea?
Master Class. Finding Sarah [a six-part documentary with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, premiering in spring]. That came from an interview I did this summer with her. We had a moment of real connection, watching the tape of her trying to get £500,000 [for access to Prince Andrew]. She said she didn’t want to go into bankruptcy. I said, “But when you look at that tape, don’t you see a morally bankrupted person? The one thing you were trying to avoid, you already are.” She said, “I never thought of it that way before.”

Ah, there you go again!
I remember the last thing I said to her when I left that interview: “Don’t let me see you on Dancing with the Stars.” She started e-mailing me and at one point asked what did I think of her doing a celebrity chef show. And I said, “That’s not going to help you. How are you going to rehabilitate yourself on a celebrity chef show? You should be working on yourself.”

You’re tough.
I said, “I’ve never mentioned it because I don’t want you to think I’m trying to use you, but if you’re going to do TV, this is what you should do.”

And she said?
“Let me think about it. I’d have to expose myself, and what does that really mean?” I said, “ All the things in your e-mails are so fascinating.” Like, she sent me an e-mail about how it’s so difficult to give up going to Spain this year. And I said, “You have no money. People who don’t have money don’t go to Spain on holiday. Hello!”

And now you’ve got her doing a show.
The great benefit of having your own channel is that you can be walking down the street. . . The other day I was in a restaurant, [and there was] the most handsome waiter. I was like, “Well, what are you interested in doing? You have a very good TV face.” [ laughs] I look at everything. If I have an idea, it feels like a huge paint box. So I have moved from “Omigod, what am I going to do?” to “I can do anything.”

You’ve said, “I know that as I start out on this next chapter there will be some mistakes and what others perceive as failures.” What will you perceive as a failure?
What will be a failure is if nobody comes and watches this network. What others will perceive as failure is if some shows don’t succeed. I’m concerned about the bigger overall picture: my belief that people are basically good and want to see the good in them reflected through their experiences and the shows that they watch. This is a gamble I’m taking. I believe that the banal state of television, the kind of insipid space that we’re in—that you can have as many channels as we have and not find anything that really interests you—means that to a great extent we’ve lost our way.

As a nation?
No. I think that television programmers program to the lowest common denominator. I happened to be on the treadmill one night and passed one of the Housewives shows—I don’t know which city—and literally my mouth was open ’cause I thought, “This is on television?” I recognize that there’s a whole group of people who find that very entertaining. I wonder for how long. I think that there are people who want to be fed just a little more.

On being a “brand”:
“I hate the word brand, but now I have succumbed to the fact that I guess I am one.”

On being the subject of a reality show (on Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes, premiering on OWN January 1 at 8 p.m. ET/PT):
“What did I say yes to that for? You know what that’s taught me? All these people doing these reality shows–I don’t know why anybody wants to be followed by a television camera all the time. There was great discussion amongst my team as to how we would document this last year [of The Oprah Winfrey Show]. I said, ‘I think it should be a documentary.’

“But I saw a first cut last week that they’ve been working on since August. Didn’t like it. And I’m bringing the team in here today to say, ‘Ya’ll have got to get real and the whole thing has to be restructured.’ I don’t like trying to create tension where there isn’t any. I think that there is enough natural tension and anxiety and exasperation going on here all the time without having to create it. If I’m going to have a piece that is representing my life behind the scenes, it has to be truthful.”

[From Parade]

Mindless television doesn’t zap your energy, it enriches you with the adrenaline that comes from other people’s problems and fighting! Plus we can order it for a couple of bucks and watch it while we’re on the damn treadmil. Unlike Oprah, we don’t have to flip the channel and be subjected to whatever happens to be on at the time.

So Oprah watches a super popular reality show and is revolted by it and thinks she can “feed” us better content, like that reality show with Fergie that she got the brilliant idea for after Fergie sent her a couple of well worded e-mails. Then Oprah sees her own reality show and demands that it be entirely reedited so that she doesn’t look like as much of a taskmaster. Oprah knows how to give advice and cover topics, she doesn’t know how to run a network. Some of the shows coming up sound interesting, but I’m thinking that Oprah’s network will be struggling and won’t have a blockbuster show to carry it.