Oprah Winfrey called famed Christian leader Bishop T.D. Jakes to assure him that the villainous megachurch leader in her upcoming OWN drama series “Greenleaf” was in no way modeled on the Dallas-based preacher.
“The only resemblance is that our main character is named ‘Bishop’ and your name is ‘Bishop,’” Winfrey said Wednesday following a press screening of the show’s pilot at Soho House in West Hollywood.
The new show’s lead character, Bishop James Greenleaf (Keith David), is the shady patriarch of a sprawling, uber-wealthy, scandal-suppressing, unfaithful, feuding family that runs a corporate megachurch in Memphis, Tennessee.
Meanwhile, the real-life media-savvy Bishop Jakes is a best-selling author who runs a 30,000-member megachurch in Dallas and has a syndicated talk show due this fall.