Oprah's "You Get a Car!"

On September 13, 2004, Oprah Winfrey opened her show's new season by giving every single member of her studio audience a new car — 276 Pontiac G6 sedans, valued at $28,500 apiece. She'd had her producers fill the crowd with people who desperately needed a vehicle, then detonated the surprise in stages, waving a giant keyring and shouting the line that would outlive the show itself: "Everybody gets a car!" The audience footage — screaming, sobbing, disbelief — became one of the most replayed moments in daytime television history, and the episode ranked among the highest-rated in the program's run.

The fine print arrived quickly. Pontiac, not Oprah, had donated the cars out of its advertising budget — the whole spectacle doubled as a launch campaign for the G6 — and while the automaker covered sales tax, the cars counted as taxable income for the winners, leaving many with bills around $6,000. One recipient summed it up: "It's not really a free car. It's more of a 75 percent-off car." The backlash chatter about taxes became a story of its own, an early lesson in the gap between TV magic and a 1099.

But the moment's real afterlife is the meme. "You get a car! And YOU get a car!" — usually rendered with a freeze-frame of Oprah mid-point — became the internet's universal template for indiscriminate abundance, applied to everything from layoffs to participation trophies. Few television clips from the 2000s get quoted weekly two decades on; this one earned it in about ninety seconds of screaming.