Oprah Winfrey is returning to scripted television more than two decades after her last regular small screen acting gig in a show that is close to her heart—a family drama centered around a black megachurch in Memphis. Winfrey, 62, plays a manipulative blues club owner in the 13-episode series Greenleaf for her own cable television channel that she called “a dream come true.”

“I believe that what we all love is a good story,” Winfrey said at a screening on Wednesday at the Tribeca film festival, ahead of the show’s TV debut on June 21. Winfrey, also an executive producer, said she saw Greenleaf as continuing the mission behind her long-running TV chat show that ended in 2011, and that also informs her magazine “O.”

“My real role on Earth is to lift the consciousness … It’s about showing people new ways of seeing themselves and seeing the problems and flaws and dysfunctions that we all have and being able to lift that just enough that you can see yourself in that,” she told the Tribeca audience. FULL REPORT


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