Producer who worked on Oprah Winfrey's $8,000,000 'you get a car' giveaway shares the 'devastating' reality winners faced once the cameras were off

Oprah Winfrey once hosted a now-iconic and viral $8 million car giveaway on her show that came with a caveat most people didn’t learn about until recently.

We’ve seen all the memes, we all know the famous ‘You get a car’ episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

However, what happened when the cameras stopped rolling was a little bit more complex.

And now a producer on the show has provided more details about the unexpected fallout from the Pontiac G6 bonanza.

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Oprah Winfrey ‘accidentally’ created one of the most viral moments in TV history

In 2004, Oprah Winfrey created the iconic ‘You get a car’ moment almost by accident.

But while the legendary tagline may have been ‘accidental’, the giveaway had been thoroughly planned.

Even so, the production team ran into an unforeseen issue.

As revealed on a podcast titled Making Oprah: The inside story of a TV revolution, the concept for the giveaway was started by Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle King.

Initially, Pontiac offered 25 cars for the show as a giveaway.

But the producers pushed the company to give a new Pontiac G6 to every member of the studio audience.

That’s 276 cars, worth about $7.7 million in total at the time of the show.

When audience members were told they’d get a free car, they were ecstatic, but there was something else they hadn’t been told yet.

How this Pontiac G6 giveaway backfired

Because the Pontiacs were gifts, they were taxed as ordinary income, and this also meant the gift tax had to be paid by the person receiving the gift.

The show’s producers, to their credit, paid for the sales tax and registration of the car, but obviously, they couldn’t pay everyone else’s taxes.

Speaking on the podcast, looking back on the show, producer Lisa Erspamer reflected on the backlash.

“It was devastating after, because ‘gift tax’ is a thing, and it’s always a complicated thing when you’re giving stuff away,” she said.

“But we paid for the sales tax and the registration for each car, and we told the audience after, if they didn’t want to have to pay a gift tax, they could actually take cash for the car.

“And because we didn’t pay the gift tax, people complained to the press, and that was devastating.

“We put our whole soul into this moment of television and with real intention to do something good, and so when people had a negative reaction, it literally hurt our feelings.”

It didn’t put the producers off recreating the same marketing stunt years later, in 2010, when audience members received a Volkswagen Beetle.

And Oprah even gave the winners some sage words along with their new set of wheels.

In the years since, the TV moment has lived on in infamy – with Cynthia Erivo even referencing it last year while hosting the Tony Awards.

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