Charity should come from the heart, we’re told, but in Oprah Winfrey’s latest strike to expand her work in television, charity comes from the desire to compete in reality TV shows.

“Oprah’s Big Give,” Oprah’s first reality show, makes its debut on ABC this coming Sunday at 9 p.m. on WEWS Channel 5.

The main idea of the show is not new in television. “Queen for a Day” was one of the America’s most reliable media hits from the 1940s to the 1960s, first on radio and then TV. Four contestants explained the unfortunate circumstances of their lives in front of a studio audience, whose applause determined which of the women was most wretched. The winner was not only given prizes but adorned with a robe and a crown while an orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance” for the new “queen” on her throne.

The show had great success as “five thousand ‘Queen’ got what they were after.  And the TV audience cried their eyes out, morbidly de- lighted to find there were people worse off than they were, and so they got what they were after,” producer Howard Blake wrote in a magazine article quoted in Maxene Fabe's "TV Game Shows" book.

Keeping the same idea, “Oprah’s Big Give” follows 10 ordinary people, who are assigned a family and given five days in which to change their lives for the better, either by raising money for necessities or providing emotional care during a distressing point in the families’ lives. Some of the contestants have stories as emotional as the needy people they’re supposed to help. There are homeless mothers, a marine wounded in Iraq, a young woman who was the victim of a drunk driver and recalls how she became a paraplegic after the accident and another woman who was sexually abused and physically abused as a child.

There are “many moments that will leave you in tears of joy,” Winfrey promised during an interview according to the Washington Post. “I wouldn’t be involved with anything that was going to humiliate of dehumanize or make anybody feel bad,” she added.

Despite the title, Winfrey is not the star or the host of the show, this job falling to her pal Nate Berkus. Winfrey will just make several appearances during the show’s eight-week run. Also she helped recruit celebrities guests like Jennifer Aniston, John Travolta, Jada Pinkett-Smith, Andre Agassi, Tony Hawk and Danica Patrick to add some savor to the competition.

Three judges are invited to comment and decide how capable of giving and sharing the contestants are and not the big sums of money they earn for those in needs. They are “Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver, football’s Tony Gonzalez, and Malaak Compton-Rock, Chris Rock’s wife.  “The judges had to look at what they gave, not just what they gave,” Berkus said in a recent conference call with reporters, Newsday reports. Based on these judgments, one of the contestants will be eliminated each week.

What the contestants don’t know is the fact that Oprah will reward the biggest giver with a $1 million prize.

“Oprah’s Big Give” has not received too much appreciation from television critics.

“There is nary a single genuine giving moments to be found during the opening hour. It is instead a profoundly hyperkinetic and unwieldy adventure in product placement, in Oprah-as-Messiah hype and, ultimately, in what’s so utterly fake and insidious about’ reality’ television itself,” begins the review in The Hollywood Reporter.

“The show feels faux intimate, dramatized with mawkish music and weepy slo-mo close-ups, neatly edited into glossy tearjerkers and, later, the on-camera judging/eliminations of the familiar reality formula. You can watch, and feel sympathy for the real problems portrayed, and feel warmed by their being somewhat alleviated, yet still feel unsettled by their manipulation into some slick kind of strategy game,” Diane Werts of Newsday writes.

We shall wait and see the big opening Sunday night. Prepare your hankies.