Think of Phil Donahue as the Norman Lear of daytime talk shows.
The popular daytime talk show host passed away Aug. 18 after a lengthy illness. He was 88.
Dating back to when the War in Vietnam was raging and Women’s and Civil Rights movements were prime fodder on evening newscasts, broadcasters generally looked the other way. The Smothers Brothers dared to mock America’s involvement in the Vietnam war and got fired for it in 1969. Producer Lear broke the ice in prime time with groundbreaking comedies such as All in the Family.
It was Donahue who moved the debate into North American living rooms. He engaged members of his studio audience as well as viewers at home in lively, town hall-style sessions tackling real issues.
The Phil Donahue Show began locally in Ohio in 1967. It was syndicated and became a sensation nationally as simply Donahue throughout the ’70s and ’80s, producing close to seven thousand episodes. Donahue’s 29 years on daytime helped shape public discourse and pulled audiences towards a more progressive and enlightened era.
Donahue was not your grandmother’s daytime TV talk show host. With that grey hair and those wire-rimmed glasses, he looked like a banker or a conservative uncle. Like M*A*S*H star Alan Alda, however, Donahue represented a new template for male role model behaviour. He was a feminist, and proud of it.
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Donahue did interview celebrities on his show, including big names such as Elton John, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Johnny Carson. Occasionally he would confront members of the Klu Klux Klan as well as Black activists.
He would also do more light-hearted shows where the cast of one series, such as Knots Landing, would be the guests. If you were looking for celebrity gossip, however, there was Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. Donahue, which eventually moved its production base to Chicago and finally New York, would tackle issues such as clergy abuse, cross-dressing, homosexuality and civil rights. He engaged his studio audience, running up and down the aisles and thrusting his microphone aggressively towards each speaker.
On news of his death, Oprah Winfrey praised Donahue as a trailblazer.
“There wouldn’t have been an Oprah Show without Phil Donahue being the first to prove that daytime talk and women watching should be taken seriously,” Winfrey posted on social media.
Donahue became somewhat of a tabloid fascination after Marlo Thomas appeared on his show in 1977. The daughter of TV and nightclub star Danny Thomas, Marlo starred as a single woman looking for work on the late ’60s series That Girl. That Donahue was instantly smitten with Thomas popped right off the screen when the two met-cute on his talk show. They married in 1980 and were together 44 years.
The couple shared a similar progressive agenda. Donahue became actively engaged in Thomas’ main fund-raising cause, the St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.
The talk show host was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom this past spring from U.S. president Joe Biden.
For more on Phil Donahue, see my video report with Marcia MacMillan at the top of this post from Monday’s appearance on CTV News Channel.
