“The average housewife is bright and inquisitive, but television treats her like some mental midget,” he wrote in his 1979 book Donahue: My Own Story.

Be fearless

While much of TV avoided contentious topics, Donahue put them on the air. The show took on the AIDS crisis and the American prison system, also televising both a child’s birth and an abortion procedure. Donahue’s first guest was famed atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who had just filed a lawsuit to halt prayer in public schools.

“We couldn’t be ponderous—we had to enter screaming,” Donahue later told Oprah Winfrey in an interview. “On the show with Madalyn, we burned the town down immediately—kaboom!”

A shoestring budget has its advantages

While Donahue’s format would be praised as groundbreaking, most of it wasn’t planned. Since Dayton was a media backwater, Donahue—with few resources and little supervision—was free to experiment. He nixed the Johnny Carson-esque trappings of a live band and an opening monologue and instead devoted his full hour to one topic.

“The show’s style had developed not by genius but by necessity,” Donahue recalled in his memoir. “The familiar talk-show heads were not available to us in Dayton, Ohio. … The result was improvisation.”

Today’s influencers pave the way for tomorrow’s stars

Donahue’s popularity would establish and enshrine daytime talk as an American institution, setting the stage for a new generation of hosts, including Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Piers Morgan, and Oprah Winfrey, whose media empire is worth an estimated $2.5 billion.

“There wouldn’t have been an Oprah Show without Phil Donahue being the first to prove that daytime talk and women watching should be taken seriously,” Winfrey posted on Instagram today. “He was a pioneer. I’m glad I got to thank him for it.”