Last month, when Iyanla Vanzant’s Fix My Life returned to television for its fifth season, it marked the second decade of her relationship with America as television’s tell-like-it-is auntie. For 20 years, she’s been offering life advice and therapeutic expertise, perhaps more enduring than any other self-help expert on television. But it’s been a rocky road getting there, and when I spoke to her in September, I wanted to understand why Vanzant has such enduring power—so I asked her to fix my life.
Vanzant first gained popularity as a self-help guru and spiritual advisor of sorts on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show back in the late 1990s, after publishing best-selling, emotional books like 1995’s Interiors: A Black Woman’s Healing… in Progress and 1996’s The Value in the Valley. Eventually, the media mogul even allowed Vanzant to essentially host The Oprah Show, while Oprah herself sat in the audience and listened like a guest.
Then, in 2001, Vanzant got a talk show deal with Barbara Walters and abruptly ditched the woman who helped her become an American household name. The Iyanla Show was cancelled after just one season. When her subsequent talk show failed, she disappeared from television, and Vanzant and Winfrey didn’t speak for over a decade. I still remember her 1998 best-selling book—she’s written 15 in total—called In The Meantime, which was a pep talk to make the best of the crappy times in your life. A college friend tried to get me to read it with her as we “waited on our husbands.” I declined.
In 2011, Vanzant made a comeback—but only after Winfrey made her kiss the ring on national television during an emotional tête-à-tête on Super Soul Sunday, broadcast on Winfrey’s then-new network OWN.
Sitting on my couch, I watched the conversation go down on television and Twitter, where the jokes were flying. It was clear that Iyanla was angling to get back in Winfrey’s good graces. Explaining why she left to produce a show with Walters, she said things like, “But Oprah, I was broken!” It was fantastic television, but it left me wondering if Vanzant ever knew anything at all—if her ideas about healing were just made-for-TV foolishness that she’d do anything to peddle once more.There have been signs, of course, that Vanzant is not necessarily a truth-teller. During her second season, two guests, Earl “DMX” Simmons and Real Housewives of Atlanta’s Sheree Whitfield were not happy with their appearances. Both said they were sold one concept and then, during filming, blindsided with another. DMX said he was supposed to talk about his addiction to women, but ended up becoming the center of a drug intervention that put him, his son Xavier and his ex-wife Tashera under hot lights. Whitfield said Vanzant was supposed to help her and her estranged husband mend fences, but that she felt attacked the entire show. To be fair, anyone who has an ongoing problem—particularly one worked out on television—tends to play a part in that problem, so we’d be wise to take these complaints with a grain of salt. Still, in America, land of televangelists and fad beliefs, it’s prudent to be skeptical of self-help gurus boasting a bachelor’s in public administration and a masters in spiritual psychology.
It’s hard to make interesting and meaningful television. Iyanla’s Fix My Life uses popular, proven tropes: secret relationship revelations, thunderous arguments, tears, family fights and people storming out of rooms because they can’t handle the truth are all scenes from the show’s many seasons. As a television fixer, Vanzant is great at what she does, which is presumably the reason that Winfrey took her back. When Vanzant tackles salacious stories like the man who fathered 34 children with 17 different women, Fix My Life is a rating juggernaut for OWN—that show alone pulled in 1.15 million viewers. She specializes in situations that inspire uncomfortable judgment—overweight families, absent and incarcerated fathers, cheating spouses, mother-daughter and transgender son-father wars—and she says what the audience is thinking, under the guise that it’s what the subject needs to hear. Watching Fix My Life gives the audience the chance to say “I’m bad but I’m not that bad” while watching Vanzant yell at a stranger.
For example, in a March 2015 show with Chris Brown’s ex-girlfriend Karrueche Tran, Vanzant hugged her like a seven-year-old while she told Tran that she allowed Chris to treat her poorly because she didn’t think more of herself, but she should. It was good television. But it still left a bad taste in my mouth, that both fixer and patient were out for something less pure than Karrueche becoming healed.
In a phone interview with Vanzant, I asked her about balancing the line between ratings and respecting her subjects. The first episode of her new season featured closeted black ministers, for instance, an issue which seems, in the shadow of the Supreme Court legalizing gay marriage in June, old news and for shock value.
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