It sounded like the kind of melodramatic confession guests make on her television talk show.
"I've been guilty of doing trash TV and not even thinking it was trash," Oprah Winfrey said in September on the eve of a new television season. "I don't want to do it anymore. I cannot listen to other people blaming their mothers for another year."
With those words, Ms. Winfrey, the grande dame of TV talk, effectively launched a national referendum. Did viewers want sharing and caring or did they prefer lurid and cheesy? The results are now in. In this fall's second electoral rout, grotesque and dysfunctional have won in a landslide.
While still the leader in daytime talk with an audience estimated at 9.4 million viewers a day, Oprah's ratings have taken a dramatic autumnal tumble, the apparent result of her shows on such shockingly mundane subjects as "Keeping a Child-Safe Home" and "Stopping Gossip." Meanwhile, the 14-month-old "Ricki Lake Show," driven by a youthful audience and more sensational topics, has soared to No. 2 among talk shows. The moral: Americans have not yet had their fill of fare such as "Surprise, I Want to Sleep With You," one of Ricki Lake's entries in the November "sweeps" ratings period.
"People might say they want high road, but then the ratings come out," said Melanie Morgan, vice president of the Earle Palmer Brown advertising agency in Bethesda. "That's not what they watched."
The topics of daytime talk might be so much ho-hum but for the stakes involved. Increasingly, local stations rely on talk shows as the backbone of their daytime programming. The shows attract many viewers and deliver audiences to local newscasts and even to network news shows. Oprah's experiment on the high road and Ricki Lake's shrewdly calculated ascent are events with multimillion-dollar implications for local broadcasters.
Ms. Winfrey's kinder and gentler program -- and its current decline -- are becoming the talk of talk television. Between October 1993 and October 1994, her national ratings fell 10 percent to 12 percent.
In Baltimore, where she was once an anchorwoman on WJZ-TV, (Channel 13,) the numbers were even worse, dropping 25 percent. In years past, "Oprah" meant $2 million in annual profits to WMAR-TV (Channel 2), which carries the show in Baltimore. Now, the station says it isn't making any money on the program.
Certainly, Ms. Winfrey is the victim of a crowded talk-show market, with 18 shows competing for attention -- three times as many as when she debuted in 1986. But no one doubts that her program is also suffering from the decision to be more sedate.
For example, Ms. Winfrey opened a recent episode by apologizing for a previous show in which she managed to get men and women in the studio audience "yelling and screaming (( at each other." Now, she said, she hoped to help men and women better understand their differences.
"Now, her shows are not obscene, but they're innocuous and boring," said Vicki Abt, a sociologist at Pennsylvania State University and an uncompromising critic of talk shows who helped persuade Ms. Winfrey to moderate her program. "There's no doubt that "The Ricki Lake Show" is not boring."
A ratings bonanza
And there's no doubt that the 26-year-old Ms. Lake, an actress who has appeared in the films of Baltimore director John Waters, is benefiting from her more traditional talk format. During this sweeps period, she has had women declare their desire to have sex with unsuspecting male friends. She has done a show on "Daughters Who Date Older Men and Moms Who Can't Stop Them" and one on "Women Who Say 'I Had His Baby and He Kicked Me to the Curb.' "
Premiering in September 1993, "The Ricki Lake Show" has enjoyed dramatic growth. Its ratings have climbed 126 percent in the last year, and her audience is now estimated at 5.8 million viewers a day.
Among women between 18 and 49 -- the most desirable audience for advertisers -- the show beats the local newscasts in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. It is the same in Baltimore: "Ricki" beats WJZ's newscast with Sally Thorner and Richard Sher, and WMAR's with Stan Stovall and Mary Beth Marsden.
"We are thrilled by the way the show is doing," said Michael Schroeder, program and promotion manager at WBFF-TV (Channel 45), the station that carries Ricki Lake in Baltimore. "It was the biggest surprise of last year."
Ms. Lake, an admirer of Ms. Winfrey, 40, now trails only her role model and is comfortably ahead of staples such as "Geraldo," "Donahue" and "Sally Jessy Raphael."
Her show is like theirs, only more so. Gail Steinberg, a co-creator of the show, talks about "aging down" the talk show format to grab young viewers. That means younger guests, livelier graphics, hipper music. Above all, it means a faster pace.
"Donahue has six guests an hour, and they stay on stage for the whole show," said Ms. Steinberg. "We'll have several segments with a couple of different entries and an average of 14 guests. There's always something happening."
