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THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 78 OCTOBER 30, 2019
Unscripted
TV Player
of the YearThe Doctor Is
in for the Long
Haul 11 seasons
in, Mehmet Oz on
his show’s health,
past ‘mistakes’
and his future
By Marisa Guthrie
M
ehmet Oz bounds through the double
doors of his production office on
the far west side of Manhattan. It’s
a Thursday in October, several hours after
arriving back in New York on the red-eye
from L.A. (he was there to make an appear-
ance on Ellen DeGeneres’ show). His white
shirt and gray suit neatly pressed, his face
slightly flushed, he’s in perpetual motion, but
never out of breath. He’s just come upstairs
from the studio where a crew is filming the
pilot for a spinoff of The Dr. Oz Show, called
The Good Dish. Distributed by Sony TV (like
Oz’s original), it’s based on a regular cook-
ing segment hosted by his daughter Daphne
Oz and Gail Simmons, Vanessa Williams and
Jamika Pessoa. If The Good Dish gets picked
up, it would premiere in fall 2020 and become
the latest asset in a wellness empire that
includes several best-selling books, a non-
profit (HealthCorps) and an eponymous
bookazine (launched by Hearst in 2014). In
2018, the 59-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon
was appointed to President Tr u m p’s council on
sports, fitness and nutrition. He maintains
faculty positions at Columbia University and
New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he
performs about 50 surgeries a year, always
with a partner. And his show, which began
in 2009 after he made more than 60 appear-
ances on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talker, is
still watched by more than 1 million viewers
every day. (That’s down from 3.7 million at its
peak in season three, as much of daytime has
endured similar viewer erosion.)
Oz’s embrace of alterna-
tive therapies and occasional
willingness to trade in
the quick-fix ethos of
diet fads have made
him a lightning rod
inside and outside themedical community. The nadir came in 2014,
when he submitted to a televised flogging
by a congressional committee investigating
scam products. “All my friends said, ‘Don’t go.’
And I went there and I realized, I don’t really
understand this so well,” he recalls, adding,
“There is a lesson in this: People want blood in
the water. But if you don’t die, they go away.”
It was a turning point for the show and for
Oz; he has become far more careful about the
products and therapies he features on his
program, which was renewed in 2018 for two
seasons, taking it into 2021. As he celebrates
his 11th season on air, THR’s Un sc r ipted T V
Player of the Year spoke about what keeps his
show and his brand healthy.Are you an entertainer or a doctor?
When we started with Oprah, it was such a
foreign concept for me to go on television and
talk to people about health. I was much more
comfortable one-on-one [with patients]. The
idea of scaling that to a broad audience was
not on my radar at all. Entertainment wasn’t
on my radar. The first time I went to Oprah [in
2003], she told me at the last second, “Bring
some organs.” So I carted the organs in an
Igloo cooler through security.What did security make of them?
I made small talk so they wouldn’t notice.
They probably thought I was Jeffrey Dahmer.
What do you even ask someone who’s coming
through with a vertebral column in his suit-
case? And I started dressing in scrubs because
I didn’t want to mess up my suit because I was
carting all these organs onto the set. I never
appreciated that inadvertently I was creating
a visual brand. So Oprah didn’t have to bother
introducing the guy in the shirt and tie any-
more, he’s obviously a doctor; he’s in scrubs.How has your own show evolved over the years?
If I do a segment that feels like year one or
two, we all notice it. Then, [the show] was
much more on the nose with the information
it’s giving you: Here are three herbs to take to
help you with your headache, here are six tips
to sleep better. It felt magazine-y.Is the daytime landscape more competitive now?
It’s different; it’s not more competitive, it’s
always been competitive. And whenever the
new shows come out, I cheer for them, I really
do. Because it’s good for me if daytime is
strong. [The genre is] in a strong period now.
We had a couple of good launches this year.Oz with daughter Daphne, who’s developing a spinoff of his show, celebrating his Emmy win in 2017 for outstanding informative talk show host.