How Phil Donahue paved the way for shows like Oprah and Maury

Prolific talk show host Phil Donahue died on Sunday at the age of 88. The Phil Donahue Show premiered in 1967 and was the first talk show to centre audience participation, conceiving the format for many talk shows that followed. As Oprah herself once wrote: "If there had been no Phil Donahue show, there would be no Oprah Winfrey show."

Entertainment reporter Teri Hart and writer Devin Gordon join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to reflect on the life and legacy of the daytime talk show pioneer.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Teri, could you take me back to the '70s and '80s and give us a sense of Donahue's importance in the world of daytime television?

Teri: He was a titan. He really did create a style of a talk show that paved the way for Oprah. For people who might be a bit younger and don't have that point of reference, he was as big, if not bigger at certain points, than Oprah was.

It used to be, television was produced in a way that was very talking head-y — you had your stoic person at the top, their voice mattered and everything emanated from them. He broke those rules and started inviting the audience to not only comment, but also ask questions. I think it kind of brings anybody back to a fundamental journalism school idea: that part of interviewing is listening. It's actually the most important part, and I think Phil Donahue really embodied that. His voice wasn't the most important in the room; the most important people in the room were the people who were there, creating the show with him, and it changed the game.

Elamin: Devin, one of the most incredible things about a week's worth of episodes of The Phil Donahue Show is that … the discussions on the show could be frivolous. But even though one day you could have this really salacious discussion, the next day you could be like, "We're going to do something very serious today." How do you think Phil was able to pull that range off?

Devin: He was trained as a journalist, right? So he had that journalist's inquisitiveness and willingness to confront. But at the same time, he was this deeply empathetic person not just with his guests, but also with his audience — his ability to empathize with that housewife at home and take her seriously, and have respect for her ideas and her life, and she had opinions about these conversations, when no one was really doing that.

He also had this anti-establishment sensibility. He was very liberal. I think that really shined through and enabled him to take seriously people from, perhaps, the margins of society who weren't really getting the attention or the respect that they would get in other venues, where they might have been brought on to be exploited and used purely for their, maybe, controversial abilities or presence on television.

Elamin: Part of that anti-establishment spirit came into play a little bit later because he had the show on MSNBC, and he publicly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and he says that's why the network fired him. Teri, Phil Donahue ruled the daytime talk show format between the '70s and '80s. As you get to the '90s, though, the ratings start to go down. He signs off for good in 1996. What do you think led to that decline?

Teri: Oprah was untouchable, and everybody who was watching daytime television just kind of shifted to her…. It's worth noting around 1996 is when options on television became so much broader. So if people were looking for that more lowbrow stuff that Phil Donahue sometimes did, they could find it elsewhere, and if people were looking for the higher brow stuff, people could also find it elsewhere on shows that maybe felt a little bit fresher. People on television have a shelf life, and Phil Donahue's was very, very long. It's quite a run.

Elamin: What role do you think Donahue and the show that he made played in the rise of tabloid TV? Is it him to "blame," or were they maybe copying the wrong thing from the format that he had?

Devin: Definitely the latter…. They were borrowing the subject matter without the approach that he brought to it. These are hosts and shows that were doing it with much more exploitative intentions — a lot of punching down — and that was something Phil would never do with his audience members or with the guests that he had on his show.

You would get the sense that someone like Jerry Springer or Maury Povich were taking advantage of these people and their problems, and almost making a distinction between them and the rest of us. We were there to point at them and laugh at them, and take almost a reality TV pleasure from them. And so in that respect, I suppose you could say that Phil Donahue influenced them. But I would definitely not go so far as to say blame, because I'm sure Phil Donahue would be nauseous at the way they approached their subjects.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.