Blame Phil Donahue

December 21 is the birthday of talk tv pioneer Phil Donahue (b.1935). How perfect that this guy with the wintery hair was born of a winter solstice.

This won’t be a celebration, per se, because the door Donahue opened is too unspeakably awful. I do think it’s unfortunate that the stampede of monsters who clambered through that door have obscured his name and place in history, though. It’s like Citizen Kane says: “People are going to know who’s responsible”. I am old enough to have watched the doleful transformation in the culture wrought by his revolutionary syndicated television program The Phil Donahue Show.

Donahue was a working class Irish Catholic kid from Cleveland. After graduating from Notre Dame he started working in broadcasting in various local markets around the country starting in the late ’50s. His famous tv talk show was launched locally in his native Ohio starting in 1967. For a while, he was like any number of local phenoms across the country. There were a bunch of these guys at the time, some of whom, like Les Crane, Tom Snyder, and Bill Boggs, managed to make a stir beyond their own markets. In 1970, Donahue’s show began to be syndicated to other parts of the country. The big moment however happened when he moved his show to a studio in Chicago in 1974. THAT’s the moment I remember so well, because that’s when our local Providence station began to carry it, and that’s when I could personally actually witness the change taking place.

Daytime talk shows were a staple before Donahue arrived, but most of them, hosted by the likes of Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and Dinah Shore, were light and celebrity-focused. Most had to do with covering the entertainment industry. Occasionally there might be a political figure, usually when they were plugging a new book. But “serious” chat was kept to a minimum. Donahue’s show was different in a couple of ways. One is that it was presented as something more substantive. “Issues” were discussed, and the guests that were booked were tailored to the issue, rather than vice versa. Obviously, ratings were still a goal, so the topics tended to be contentious hot-button things like abortion, capital punishment, addiction, and so forth. His other innovation was audience participation. People in the studio audience had the opportunity to ask questions of the guests directly and Donahue would pick up the conversational thread to follow up. And people at home could call in to the show, as well, like on talk radio and the later Larry King Live.This added an element of surprise and spontaneity to the show.

I’m obviously not against serious journalism or substantive talk. In those days, what passed for that was provided by the likes of David Frost, and Dick Cavett, for example, and the weekend shows by the Big 3 news divisions like Meet the Press. But it’s that populist aspect, the audience involvement, that was worrying and points to the way to the morass that engulfs us now. For, very rapidly the show was compelled to reach farther afield for the thrills it offered. Controversy was the goal. So that the arguments about political or social issues began to slide into outrageous spectacle for its own sake. In its day, for a time, anyway, the Donahue show was the bellwether for television as tabloid and freak show. The diverse parade of guests included Nazis, members of the Klan, Minister Farrakhan, punk rock musicians, people with eating disorders, and “mulattoes who pass for white”. I vividly remember individual episodes for the impressions they made. It’s the first place I ever saw Rush Limbaugh and the nation’s chief atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. It’s also the first place I ever saw post-op transexuals.

Obviously, we don’t regard trans people as “freaks”, although they were much rarer a half century ago. I was astonished to learn today that one of the people on that episode was young Eve Golden, the show biz biographer I’ve mentioned here many times (most recently in the context of her new Lupe Velez book — listen to our podcast conversation about it here). Of the Donahue episode Eve says “The people from the hospital asked me to go on. It was me, a trans man, a cross dresser, the Professor, and Mary Ann.” (She’s kidding with respect to Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells, though I sure wish she wasn’t!) Anyway, my mind is thoroughly blown by a life’s journey that would bring me into regular contact with someone I first saw on TV a half century ago. We’re all so much flotsam and jetsam, I guess. Me, I’m flotsam, but I’m thinking of transitioning to jetsam.

As a personality, Donahue was more than up to the task of presiding over his program, stage managing it like a ringmaster at a circus. He had a flamboyant, outgoing personality, and frankly, I found him a bit of a bubblehead. He wasn’t terribly bright or deep, he was just good at THIS. John Roarke of Fridays used to do a KILLER impression of him — now that’s dating all three of us!

Interestingly, in light of all that came after, Donahue was very much an old school liberal, and that’s one of the things that made him transitional. He was married to Marlo Thomas, and, along with Alan Alda, was one of the most prominent male feminists in the nation. This moment, when liberals (and not proto-Fascist conservatives) were still kings of exploitational media always calls to mind Eric Bagosian’s play and film Talk Radio (1987, 1988), which was inspired by real life left wing shock-jock Alan Berg. Unlike many who came later, Donahue did have a compassionate side, and it can also be said that some of his humanistic successors, mostly women (Oprah, Ellen, The View) borrowed from his playbook.

But so did Jerry Springer, Morton Downey Jr, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jesse Raphael, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake, and Maury Povitch. By the mid ’90s, Donahue was outfreaked on multiple fronts. Ratings fell. Stations dropped him. The last gasp of The Phil Donahue Show (by then rebranded Donahue) was in 1996. Today, when you hear people talk about him, they express nostalgia for his relatively good taste.

Stay tunedfor my upcoming book Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.