Phil Donahue, whose pioneering daytime talk show launched an indelible television genre, dies at 88

Phil Donahue, the master of daytime TV talk whose eponymous show was ultimately devoured by the monster it created, died Sunday after a long illness, according to a brief report on the "Today" show early Monday. He was 88.

With his signature white hair and  boyish, high-octane stage presence, Donahue was among the nation's most recognized figures over a three-decade span.

As influential to daytime as Johnny Carson was to late night, there were no half-measures with Donahue. From his production perch in Chicago, and later in New York, Donahue checked off every hot button issue, polemic and controversy in American life over that long run. Seemingly nothing — or at least nothing with latent heat — escaped the Donahue treatment: Alcoholism, drug abuse, neo-Nazis, domestic abuse and pedophilia were go-to topics. Civil Rights, consumer activism, and the anti-war movement were a reliable part of the mix early on, later AIDS and gay rights.

First-wave — then second and ultimately third-wave — feminism was embraced on the show, along with reproductive rights. An Irish Catholic and proud Notre Dame graduate (class of '57), Donahue once broadcast an abortion on the show.

A showman with a flair for the outrageous, his first guest in 1967 was atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair. He later devoted an edition to male strippers which concluded with one guests burning his own jockstrap before a rapturous studio audience.

During the show's heyday in the early '80s, scarcely a week went by without another advertiser defection or TV station cancellation. Donahue seemed to relish the blowback, or at least he could absorb it. For years, "Donahue" was one of daytime's biggest draws and a huge hit for New York flagship WNBC/4.

And then, the beginning of the end arrived in 1986, also in Chicago, where a young former TV news anchor, launched her own nationally syndicated talk show.. Over the decades, Oprah Winfrey credited Donahue for the TV talk revolution she commandeered — "If it weren't for Phil Donahue, there would never have been an Oprah Show," she told her own magazine — but his rapid decline was also in direct proportion to her breathtaking ascent. By 1995, when Ch. 4 finally dropped "Donahue," "Oprah" was TV's biggest hit, and Winfrey the world's most influential woman.

By the time "Donahue" was canceled in 1996, Winfrey had nbecome a meta-personality with vast crossover appeal among Black and white audiences. Donahue was also out-hustled — or as critics said, out-trashed — -by a crop of newcomers who were heedless to "Donahue's" circumspection, such as it was. They included Sally Jessy Raphael, Richard Bey, Montel Williams, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones and Geraldo Rivera. In an Emmy Legends interview Donahue sat for not long after his show ended, he said that "the street became very crowded with 'Donahue' followers. It got racer and racer — two guys and a girl and they're gonna tell you who's the father of the baby she's carrying! WE didn't do that."

Squeezed by trash talk on one side and the Oprah express on the other, Donahue didn't stand a chance. He tried to jump-start his show again in 2003 on MSNBC. By then, the competition was "The O'Reilly Factor" the reboot didn't last a year.

Like so many TV success stories, Donahue's began deep in the shadow of giants. When he was starting out on a small station in Dayton, Ohio, Hollywood-based Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were the twin towers of daytime talk. They largely set the rules of the game, with a focus on newsmakers, entertainers, musical performers, variety acts and an aversion to controversy.

A natural-born iconoclast who in time rejected the teachings of the Catholic church, Donahue saw an opening. He couldn't attract celebrities to his new show, but instead found something much better — the growing tumult of American life. "You can't overstate the changes" in the country during the 1960s and '70s, he said during the Emmy Legends interview. "In 1967, there were ashtrays on elevators [and] most women stayed home. I would drive to the drugstore with my three year old standing in the front seat [while] today my grandchildren are strapped in the back seat like they're going to Mars. The consumer movement grew up with us [on the show] and we grew up with the anti-war movement, then the gay rights movement. The people who had something to say about these issues were on my television show. It was a wonderful, wonderful 29-year odyssey."

Donahue also jumped feet-first into politics and religion — borderline-apostasy for talk TV of the '60s and '70s. "I began to examine my own religion and came to the conclusion that praising the Lord and passing the ammunition were mutually exclusive ideas [and] that God is not Santa Claus waiting to reward me for good or punish me for evil," he said.

He was born  Phillip John Donahue on Dec. 21, 1935, part of a middle-class Irish Catholic family in Cleveland. The family moved to Centerville, Ohio, when Donahue was a child. He was in the first graduating class of St. Edward High School, a Catholic all-boys preparatory school in Lakewood, in 1953; After graduating from Notre Dame, he later left the church, but recalled in his 1979 memoir, "Donahue: My Own Story" that "a little piece" of his faith would always be with him.

After a series of early jobs in radio and TV, Donahue moved his radio talk show to Dayton TV station WLWD in 1967. (It moved in 1974 to Chicago, where it stayed for years, then ended its run in New York.)

The early proto-"Donahue" featured discussions with spiritual leaders, doctors, homemakers, activists and even neighbor Irma Bombeck — pretty much anyone who passed through Dayton — while the host later wrote that the show's structure and tone were products of serendipity. "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 [so] the result was improvisation."

He quickly became adept at something most stand-up comics learn early on in their career — workig the audience. (He is considered the first daytime talk show host to have an audience.) Without a couch or any other talk TV accoutrement, he wandered among audience members, pushinga mic in their face. The idea was to get a conversation going, either through call-ins or participation. Audience members tended to oblige. On the air and in person, Donahue had the air of a hip young priest, or favorite college prof. Irrepressible and approachable, he eventually earned the highest honor pop culture could bestow by the mid-1980s: Not one, but two "Saturday Night Live" impressions (Joe Piscopo, Darrell Hammond).

Donahue became the other half one of the decade's power couples when he married actor Marlo Thomas in 1980. He'd first met her as a guest on the show, telling her that she was "really fascinating," while grasping her hand. "You are wonderful," Thomas replied. "You are loving and generous, and you like women and it’s a pleasure, and whoever the woman in your life is, is very lucky." His marriage to Margaret Cooney in 1958 ended in divorce in 1975. Both had five children together — Michael, Kevin, Daniel, Mary Rose, and James. Their youngest son, James, died of an aneurysm in 2014 at the age of 51.

— with AP