It appears Oprah chose a good time to quit.

The Oprah Winfrey Show has hit an all time low with ratings recently slipping below the 3.0 mark.  Since the show’s inception it has never gone below said mark.

The show faced a few issues in the recent weeks, but it’s nothing it hasn’t handled before.  The show was in repeats leading up to a holiday and for two days during the week the show was preempted in favor of Wimbledon coverage in 14 markets.  These could be the major factors in the slip but I have another theory.

With the launch of Oprah’s new network, OWN, a contest was launched to give a regular person a chance at having their own reality program.  There were many categories to apply to like Talk Show, Health Show, and a Wildcard category for those who didn’t fit in the others.

 One individual rose to the top like a balloon- Zack Anner.  Zack was born with cerebral palsy (which he says “is the sexiest of the palsies”) and made a hilarious video about how he’d like to make a travel show for folks who never thought they could travel.

The controversy started when all of a sudden a woman named Dr. Phylis, an almost carbon copy of Oprah herself, took the number one spot from Zack in a matter of 20 minutes.  Because of the wonders of the Internet, fans saw that Dr. Phylis seemed to gain two votes for every one vote given to Zack.  This sparked search terms like “Oprah hates the handicapped” to pop up on Google Trends.

While I’m sure Oprah herself had nothing to do with what happened, it does look like one of her executives decided to take matters into their own hands and dethrone Zack from his number one spot.  In my not so humble opinion, this is probably the main reason for ratings slippage.