Before there was Oprah, there was Phil.
Television icon Phil Donahue, once dubbed “the king of daytime talk,” died Sunday at the age of 88. For those who weren’t around when Donahue had his legendary run, when he pioneered the now-familiar technique of incorporating audience participation into a talk show (and taking calls from viewers), when Donahue was often making news by taking on hot-button topics, it might be hard to fathom just how much juice he carried, but he was an absolute force for decades. (This during an era when there were far fewer options for viewers to consume news and information, and national television numbers dwarfed the ratings of today. If you were big, you were BIG.)
Phil Donahue was an influencer before we called ‘em influencers.
From Ronald Regan to Hubert Humphrey, from John Wayne to Richard Pryor, from Muhammad Ali to Nelson Mandela ... they all did “Donahue.” He took his show to Russia for a week of programs. He was the first Western journalist to visit Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear disaster. He hosted a number of important TV specials, including one in which the late Ryan White, a teenager from Indiana who was one of the first children to be diagnosed with AIDS, talked to children about the illness.
To be sure, Donahue also indulged in exploitative topics, e.g., shows featuring male strippers and lesbian go-go dancers and Donahue donning a dress and stockings in a show about cross-dressing. His style could be off-putting and abrasive. He wasn’t for everyone, and he never apologized for that. If you didn’t like him, that was your issue. Nobody in the history of TV has appealed to everyone.
Donahue launched “The Phil Donahue Show” in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967, with an initial reach of just four stations in Ohio and Indiana, but by the time the show moved its home base to Chicago in 1974, the program (which was eventually renamed “The Donahue Show” and then simply “Donahue”) had entered nationwide syndication.
His first Chicago home was at WGN-Channel 9, where he entertained viewers and the studio audience while taking on topics ranging from the typical lifestyle daytime fodder to cutting-edge issues. In 1982, the show moved to the old WBBM TV studios on McClurg Court, the site of the first presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960. (Sidebar: I was an intern at WBBM-FM, which was in the same building, during Donahue’s first year at WBBM-Channel 2. On a couple of occasions, when winter weather had prevented a few studio audience members from attending and there was an open seat or two, I was allowed to sit in the stands. I particularly remember a fascinating episode that was entirely devoted to a one-on-one conversation between Donahue and the legendary Lana Turner. What a kick!)
Donahue was a passionate, energetic, risk-taking, groundbreaking, made-for-TV personality who embraced controversy and took on virtually any subject without hesitation. Yes, he could be over the top and bombastic — and that made for enormously effective television. With his trademark mop of white hair and his penchant for delivering fantastically theatrical monologues, Donahue was a singular presence. (Little wonder he was impersonated on “Saturday Night Live” by three different performers: Joe Piscopo, Phil Hartman and finally Darrell Hammond, whose take on Donahue was priceless and perfect.)
In 1985, Donahue left Chicago for New York City and began doing his show in Studio 8-G at Rockefeller Plaza. (David Letterman, who was hosting late nights at NBC at the time, was particularly thrilled about this and made a huge deal about Donahue’s arrival.) By that time, a Baltimore television personality named Oprah Winfrey had moved to Chicago to host a half-hour talk show called “AM Chicago” on WLS-Channel 7, and in 1986 the program was expanded to an hour, renamed “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and went nationwide. It wasn’t long before Oprah had supplanted Donahue as the No. 1 talk show host in America and soared to previously unseen heights.
Donahue’s show actually continued on for another decade, before he chose to end it and moved on to other projects, including a brief stint on MSNBC in the early 2000s, and co-directing the important and acclaimed documentary “Body of War,” which told the story of Iraq War veteran Tomas Young.
Mostly, though, it was that daytime talk show, with Donahue taking on issues ranging from gay rights to bigotry to atheism to race to civil rights to feminism, that brought lively and informed discussion into the nation’s living rooms.
If we had a Mount Rushmore of daytime talk show hosts, of course it would start with Oprah, but there would most certainly be a place for Phil Donahue.
