Oprah just proved she's the best of all time

Holy shit, what an interview!

• I watched it. Of course I watched it! Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the royal rebels will go down as the TV event of the year. But the thing that stood out to me the most wasn’t Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s revelations about life within the royal walls, it was the calm, measured tone struck by Oprah, in one of her best performances yet. Let’s go…

Oprah Winfrey sits bolt upright in her chair.

As she eyeballs royal rebel Meghan Markle, Winfrey’s eyebrows arch over a pair of thick, rimless glasses that exaggerate her eyes.

There’s a sudden flash of anger.

“What?!” spits Oprah with the kind of fiery tongue you’d expect from an aghast Hollywood villain facing their demise, not a broadcasting veteran into her 67th year.

For a moment, with million-dollar curls cascading around her face, Winfrey can’t believe her ears.

“What?!” she exhales again. “Hold up. Stop right now … who is having that conversation with you?”

No one delivers a better one-word, mid-interview shock response than Oprah.

She's been doing it for years, for decades, for a life-time, in one big-name celebrity interview after another.

She did it to Michael Jackson in 1993, when she questioned the pale-faced singer about all those plastic surgery rumours.

She did it to Tom Cruise in 2005, when her questions about his relationship with Katie Holmes made him act like a 14-year-old who'd just discovered his first Playboy magazine.

And in 2013, she did it to disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong when he finally admitted all those doping rumours were true.

This time she reeled in her biggest fish yet, spending a reported three years courting Markle and her husband Prince Harry before, and after, they controversially fled the confines of the royal family in 2020 - a situation now known as ‘Megxit’.

Lifting the lid on Buckingham Palace’s dirty secrets is a dream catch for any broadcaster.

Biographers, tabloid journalists, documentarians and entire Netflix series have dedicated themselves to doing what Oprah does in Oprah with Meghan and Harry, the CBS special that aired in America yesterday, and on Three in New Zealand tonight.

Across a 90-minute interview containing what 1 NEWS at Six host Simon Dallow called “bombshell after bombshell”, Oprah did not disappoint.

She got Meghan and Harry to reveal their televised wedding was for public consumption, as the pair had tied the knot three days earlier.

She got Markle to admit life within the royal family was lonely and isolating, and that she’d contemplated suicide.

And she also got them to admit they’d considered moving to New Zealand instead of Canada, then California, where they live just down the road from Oprah.

Along the way, there were plenty of thrilling titbits: that Markle once worked at a frozen yoghurt shop called Humphrey Yogart; that Harry and Meghan spend their spare time raising rescue chickens together; and that Markle uses the odd phrase, “That’s a really loaded piece of toast,” as an aside.

But the biggest revelation - and Oprah’s biggest, “What?!” moment - came about a half-hour in when Markle discussed the couple’s reasons for leaving the royal family.

It included the revelation that their first child, Archie, had been denied any special royal security services.

Most shockingly, Markle claimed Archie’s skin colour was raised as a potential issue within the family.

“That was relayed to me from Harry. Those were conversations that family had with him,” she told Oprah.

Oprah knows when she’s onto a big moment, and she stretched this out perfectly, pausing and reframing the same question for effect.

“There’s a conversation with you about how dark your baby is going to be?” the shocked interviewer queried.

It’s easy to see why that, just moments after the interview finished screening, The Daily Mail’s UK site went into meltdown mode, cramming more than 50 related headlines onto its homepage.

To be fair, if any of Oprah’s interviews deserved that treatment, this was it. This was huge, titanic, as big as it gets.

Oprah's just so good at this: her caring eyes, her agreeable moans, her gentle gestures and careful interjections are a masterclass in patient, attentive, calm interviewing.

The way Oprah pinched her fingers together and painted an air rainbow as she asked Markle, “Were you silent - or were you silenced?” was a journalistic work of art.

Even though the interview was socially distanced in a courtyard surrounded by vines and concrete pillars, it felt as personal and intense as it possibly could be.

But this was something more than just another big celebrity interview. This was a merging of brands, like Google and YouTube, or Facebook and Instagram.

For Oprah, she got to cement her status as the world’s pre-eminent celebrity questioner. There is nothing else left to prove. She’s done it all now. This was the big one - and she nailed it.

For Harry and Markle, being interviewed by Oprah means they’re accepted into the American celebrity eco-system. Without royal salaries backing them any more, they also need a job. Oprah’s massive contact list can help them with that.

There was also a spectacle element to it all, a sudden peeling back of curtains that are always held tightly shut. That’s why ratings for the CBS special have gone through the roof – it would be surprising if Three didn’t report the same.

The royals have always kept a lid on their problems, but this time a wrecking ball has ripped through Buckingham Palace. The monarchy’s got some massive questions to answer, and the coming days will see if they can survive.

* This story first appeared on Stuff.co.nz.