Does Oprah know her flock?

In the summer of 2010, NBC tried to tap into Secret-mania and the rest of woo-hoo-world by trotting out its new reality series, Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. But NBC was late to the party, catching the wave after it had already broken on-shore and begun to ebb. By summer 2010, SHAMland had taken its share of shots. By summer 2010, major networks, like, oh, ABC, were already running hour-long shows like, oh, a certain self-help critic's Prime Time Mind Games segment on James Ray's sweat lodge debacle (which ABC plans to rerun, by the way. Check your listings). Tony failed to, er, attract a sufficiently large audience, and the series was unceremoniously canceled after just two shows.

[Photo: Oprah gets the famed Firewalk Experience.]

Now comes Oprah Winfrey and OWN. Despite some recent successes (thanks in no small part to the untimely death of Whitney Houston), OWN has struggled to find its voice...and a consistent audience. Winfrey's people had a semi-noisy falling out with Jenny McCarthy before the show even got on-air, and then pulled the plug on Rosie's ratings loser after five lackluster months.

Desperate for content to fill her flailing network, Oprah has decided to resuscitate Tony's moribund show, apparently under the theory that, whatever else viewers may or may not like, there is no limit to her disciples' appetite for empowering fluff.

So I guess we'll see if the Big T still has enough mojo to prop up the Big O. (Nasty, gratuitous, thoroughly cheap shot: Is Tony still taller than Oprah is wide, these days?)