(NewsNation) — Phil Donahue, a daytime television staple dubbed “the King of Daytime Talk,” died at 88. His show launched the genre of television that brought success to Oprah Winfrey, Montel Williams, Ellen DeGeneres and many others.
“He invented the genre,” NewsNation correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera said. “He was the first one, I think, to recognize that the home audience, the audience at home during the day, the caregivers, the homemakers, were interested in the world.”
Rivera and former talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael joined NewsNation’s “Elizabeth Vargas Reports” to discuss Donahue’s legacy.
The format set “The Phil Donahue Show” apart from other interview shows of the 1960s and made it a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was particularly popular with female audiences.
“There were issues of civil rights, women’s rights, consumer protection, interviews with JFK, with Malcolm X, you know, for goodness sake, Donahue really was, you know, that person who brought that to the home audience,” Rivera said.
“Nothing was off limits. And he had a seriousness about him that in many ways, mitigated the salacious nature of those controversial topics, whether it was gender preferences or all the rest of that. He really was a pioneer way out. In fact, I think that after Phil, then came Oprah and Sally and me and Regis in that first cadre, that we were his acolytes in a sense,” Rivera said.
The show was syndicated in 1970 and ran on national television for the next 26 years, racking up 20 Emmy Awards for the show and for Donahue as host as well as a Peabody for Donahue in 1980. In May, President Joe Biden awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Donahue, who was cited as a pioneer of the daytime talk show.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.