Australia!

I'm going to cram three days worth of Australia shows into one post.

I'm not even sure how long the Oprah folks were in Australia, but everything about these shows felt rushed and weird. There were 300 guests to follow, plus Oprah and Gayle and all the people Oprah surprised while she was Down Under. So cramming all of that into four one-hour shows was...ambitious, for lack of a better word

Which is not to say that I'm going to complain all that much. The fact is, these shows were fun. I said in my first (brief) post about the Australia shows that it was Oprah at her best, and I'm not backing off that claim.  It's just that it seemed like they had enough material to fill two weeks' worth of shows, and then some. So it just felt a little hurried.

Oprah surprised some Australian viewers at their homes, and surprised a pregnant super fan at a baby store, giving her a billion things for a nursery. The lady was due to have a c-section the next day, so I would hope she already had her nursery set up, but that sure was a lot of nice stuff Oprah gave her. The lady might want to look into selling that stuff on eBay. Cha-ching!

We saw some of the excursions the audience members went on, but I guess that's where I felt things were lacking, and why I thought things felt hurried. I mean, I know the show is called Oprah, and people like to know what she's doing, but the big excitement of the premiere episode was in watching the audience members' reactions to the news that they were going! to! Australia! So though we saw a woman surprise her husband with news of her pregnancy (super cute), and saw some people on hot air balloons and on other adventures, there just wasn't a lot of that. There was no indication as to how the audience was broken up into groups to go to Uluru, or to Olivia Newton-John's spa, or wherever else they went. And with 300 people, you know that every single one of them had a story to tell, and I would have liked to have seen more about them.



Oprah has always claimed that her show is about ordinary people, but the big focus for these Australia episode seemed to be the big "O" that lit up on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or the big celebrities who dropped by for the shows. Why hear more about someone's first trip Down Under, when you can watch Hugh Jackman fly in on a zip line and nearly rip his eye out in the process?

These Australia shows were certainly a spectacle, and I can only sort of imagine the amount of work that Oprah's production team had to do in order to get this thing planned and executed. But I'll take the "ordinary folks" enjoying a trip to Kangaroo Island (I believe we saw only one shot of that) over an interview with Russell Crowe any day of the week.

I will say, though, that the performance of "I Still Call Australia Home," featuring the Qantas Choir, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Newton-John, Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, Russell Crowe, and eventually Oprah, was a little bit spine-tingling. I love seeing a giant flag unfurled, even when it's not my own flag. And I love it when huge groups of people all know the same song, and sign it from the bottom of their hearts. I may be an athiest and a liberal and a general hater of America (according to those who oppose me politically, anyway), but put me in a group of people on a soccer field on an Air Force base on July 4th, while the fireworks explode above, and then play a little "God Bless the U.S.A." and you'll see a tear or two.

These shows did inspire me and Katie to watch Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. Katie had never seen it, but I had, and I love it. Baz Luhrmann could probably get me to have his babies without trying too hard. Katie might not be so sure, since roughly at the climax of the movie (if you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about), she broke into uncontrollable sobs. You would have thought someone had shot her puppy. Katie recovered, after not just a little bit of laughter from me, and we were able to finish the movie (a movie she eventually admitted to loving, I might add). But still. It was intense.

So, since I wanted more of the audience and less of the celebrity angle, and since Oprah indirectly made Katie cry, let's just give her (and her staff) a "B-" for the Australian adventure shows.

Yesterday's show featured Oprah's family secret. You already know about it by now, but I'll be back soon to tell you what I thought.