TV talk show legend Phil Donahue dead at 88

Phil Donahue pioneered the modern daytime talk shows featuring audience participation.

Longtime TV talk show host Phil Donahue died on Sunday night following a long illness, his family said. He was 88.

Donahue, a television pioneer who introduced the world to the modern format of daytime talk shows that featured audience participation, died at home surround by his family, including his wife of 44 years, Marlo Thomas.

Dubbed “the king of daytime talk,” Phil Donahue was the first to incorporate audience participation in a talk show, typically during a full hour with a single guest.

The Phil Donahue Show became a trendsetter in daytime television, where it was particularly popular with female audiences, and spurred a new category of talk shows that would dive into social issues and current events.

Later renamed Donahue, the program launched in Dayton, Ohio, in 1967. Donahue’s willingness to explore the hot-button issues emerged immediately, when he featured atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair as his first guest. He would later air shows on feminism, homosexuality, consumer protection and civil rights, among hundreds of other topics.

The show featured discussions with spiritual leaders, doctors, homemakers, activists and entertainers or politicians who might be passing through town. He said striking upon the show’s winning formula was a happy accident.

“It may have been a full three years before any of us began to understand that our program was something special,” Donahue wrote in his 1979 memoir, Donahue, my own story. “The show’s style had developed not by genius but by necessity. The familiar talk-show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. …The result was improvisation.”

The show included radio-style call-ins, which Donahue greeted with his signature, “Is the caller there?”