Phil Donahue, Talk Host Who Made Audiences Part of the Show, Dies at 88

Phil Donahue, who in the 1960s reinvented the television talk show with a democratic flourish, inviting audiences to question his guests on topics as resolutely high-minded as human rights and international relations, and as unblushingly lowbrow as male strippers and safe-sex orgies, died on Sunday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by Susan Arons, a representative of the family.

“The Phil Donahue Show” made its debut in 1967 on WLWD-TV in Dayton, Ohio, propelling Mr. Donahue on a 29-year syndicated run, much of it as the unchallenged king of daytime talk television.

Almost from the start, “The Phil Donahue Show” dispensed with familiar trappings. There was no opening monologue, no couch, no sidekick, no band — just the host and the guests, focused on a single topic.

At the time, audiences were expected to be seen and not heard, unless prompted to applaud. Mr. Donahue changed that. He quickly realized from chatting with audience members during commercial breaks that some of them asked sharper questions than he did. And so he began his practice of stalking the aisles, microphone in hand, and letting those in the seats have their say. He also opened the telephone lines to those watching at home. Electronic democracy, as some called it, had arrived.

Few subjects, if any, were off limits for Mr. Donahue, who was said to have told his staff, “I want all the topics hot.” It mattered little that at times the subjects made some viewers, and local station managers, squirm. His very first guest was guaranteed to stir controversy: Madalyn Murray O’Hair, at the time America’s most famous, and widely unpopular, atheist.

Across the years — he moved from Dayton to Chicago in 1974, and then to New York in 1985 — he interviewed presidential candidates and Hollywood stars, consumer advocates and feminist pioneers. He also televised a child’s birth, an abortion, a reverse vasectomy and a tubal ligation. From inside a maximum-security prison in Ohio, he examined the American penal system. He was among the first television hosts to explore the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and the first Western journalist to go to Chernobyl, in Ukraine, after the 1986 nuclear accident there.