• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, August 22, 2024

Once upon a time, there was this TV company called Multimedia, which owned newspapers and TV stations.

Based in South Carolina, the company created a syndication division that it based in Cincinnati at a TV station it then owned, WLWT.

From this base of operations, the company developed, produced and distributed TV shows, most notably three talk shows -- “The Phil Donahue Show” starting in 1976, “The Sally Jessy Raphael Show” (1983) and “The Jerry Springer Show” (1991).

The irony was that the latter two shows came to be known for the kinds of excesses that eventually drove “Donahue” off the air in 1996.

But for years before that, Phil Donahue -- who died Sunday at age 88 -- was the undisputed champion of daytime talk. 

Granted, it was a field with few competitors at first, but it may have been Donahue’s success that laid the groundwork for the explosion of daytime talk shows in the latter half of the 1980s and 1990s.

Donahue had been on the air under Multimedia ownership for 10 years before “The Oprah Winfrey Show” came along in 1986.

As the years went by, Donahue and Oprah came to be known as lone standouts who stayed away from the contention and physical confrontations that came to characterize the talk-show arena.

Geraldo Rivera famously had his nose broken by a flying chair. Sally Jessy Raphael featured out-of-control children who the show sent off to brat boot camps. 

Fights broke out on “The Jerry Springer Show” literally every day. And in the aftermath of an episode of “The Jenny Jones Show,” one guest murdered another one.

The mayhem on the other talk shows proved to be enormously popular. In the face of this competition, Phil Donahue’s “high-road” approach was not sustainable. 

Ratings declined for a couple of years, and then “The Phil Donahue Show” began to get dropped by major stations. He knew it was over and he called it a day.

Looking back, Phil Donahue emerged from the fray with his integrity intact -- not an easy feat in a business where integrity can be rare. 

A statement from Geraldo Rivera on Monday was typical of the tributes that poured in after Donahue’s death was announced earlier this week by Marlo Thomas, Donahue’s wife of 44 years.

“He was a hero, a talk show pioneer who inspired me to try my hand at the genre he invented,” wrote Rivera, 81. “What an historic figure.”