Tarell Alvin McCraney decided to take a nap in the middle of the day.

It was a rare decision for a man who swears he “rarely” sleeps, much less one who followed up his Oscar win for Moonlight’s screenplay in February by selling a coming-of-age series to Oprah Winfrey’s network OWN,

all while serving a term as chair of Yale’s playwriting department. McCraney’s rare moment of midday peace wouldn’t last long, though, as he was shortly awoken from his nap by a phone call.

A familiar, sonorous voice greeted him: “Hello, Tarell. It’s Oprah.”

McCraney, still half asleep, went silent. “Maybe this dream will stop,” he remembers thinking. Winfrey chided him back to consciousness: “Well, now you can tell everybody that you were sleeping, and Oprah called you and woke you up.”

Waking people up has been Oprah’s calling for the last, oh, three decades or so. The mogul—who chafes at the limits of a word like “mogul”

spent the first portion of her career redefining television with her flagship series The Oprah Winfrey Show, which reeled in millions of viewers and created an untouchable brand.

After 25 seasons, she traded that reliable success for OWN, an entire TV network. What launched in January 2011 as a hub for spiritual, feel-good content that could appeal to just about anyone with a soul has now evolved,

after a few fits and starts, into verdant ground for scripted fare that caters particularly well to black women, a group, Shondaland aside, still largely underserved by television.

Shows from star creators like Tyler Perry and Ava DuVernay have helped turn what once seemed like a celebrity folly into a major player in the prestige TV landscape, and one helping take cable TV even further from the white male antiheroes who once defined it.

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