Clearly, Oprah Winfrey began the New Year determined to OWN it. She's doubling down on her Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) by premiering, on January 1, 2012, the inaugural edition of her new talk show -- her first since stepping down from her syndicated empire as the Queen of All Media.

Her new show, televised Sundays at 9 p.m. ET, is called Oprah's Next Chapter, and it's quite a risk, as well as quite a departure.

She's done away with the studio audience that supported and adored her for 25 years. Instead of leading her millions of fans towards books and movies and issues and free cars, she's following -- following her own interests, and visiting people she finds interesting and/or inspiring.

And you know what? By playing against her established strengths, and working out with new muscles, Oprah Winfrey has done it again.

Her first, two-hour installment of Oprah's Next Chapter, profiling Aerosmith and American Idol loose cannon Steven Tyler, was impressively informative, informal, and entertaining...

It began with a shot of Tyler, early in the morning at his lakefront New Hampshire home, ascending to the second-story deck overlooking the water and jumping in. Later, he explained to Oprah, who visited him there, that it's a morning ritual -- one that connects him to his childhood, both geographically (he grew up there) and emotionally (it keeps him real, wakes him up and connects him with nature).

Oprah Winfrey, with Oprah's Next Chapter, is making quite a leap here, too.

In essence, this new series is most similiar to the classic structure of the Barbara Walters Specials. Oprah visits her subjects on their home turf, gives us an up-close-and-personal tour of their intimate surroundings, gets even more intimate with her questions, and even agrees to be taken around, like some tourist with a TV crew, as the subject takes them on a guided romp through local places of special interest to them.

To Tyler, that special place is deep in the neighboring woods, where he and Oprah get close to nature, and to some sort of spiritualism, by smelling sod. No, it's not another Steven Tyler drug misadventure, though that period of his life is covered. It's a moment where Tyler feels comfortable enough to be honest, even at the risk of looking or sounding silly.

Which he might, except you sense the true connection between this very unlikely duo.

Early in the two-hour show, Oprah asks Tyler questions she might just as easily be asking of herself. How, she asks him, do you "live a life where you are idolized, and hold on to yourself?"

Later, driving her around in the second hour, Tyler tells her she really gets him, which he says almost no one does. And, watching the show, you believe it. Whether talking about his father, his childhood, his band, his drug use, his children and ex-wives or his career moves, he seems eager to speak honestly, directly, and without affect.

And so they talk. About Tyler's father, who died mere days before the program was filmed. About Tyler's eldest daughter, Mia, and his girlfriend, Erin Brady, each of whom joins the conversation at some point. (That's Brady, seen with Tyler and Oprah, in the photo at the top of this column.) About launching the band Aerosmith -- look, there's one of the group's earliest keyboards, circa 1972! -- and deciding, many decades later, to revamp his career by becoming a judge on American Idol.

The solace of Lake Sunapee, as it turns out, worked wonders for Oprah Winfrey as well as her guest. Freed from the demands of entertaining and relating to a studio audience, Oprah was able to ask questions at a different pace, with a different tone -- and, at more than one key moment in this two-hour special, to let the silence hang.

Future guests on Oprah's Next Chapter are scheduled to include the full range of guests, from the absurdly famous (George Lucas) to the everyday. In following her own muse and seeking out the people who interest her, Oprah Winfrey didn't need to reinvent the wheel. She just needed to rewrite her own playbook.

She did. And based on opening-night results, her instincts, once again, have been proven right.

The two-hour Steven Tyler show is repeated Wednesday, Jan. 4, at 9 p.m. ET.