The History of Daytime Trash Talk Shows.
The origins of today's trash daytime talk shows lie in Phil Donahue's entrance to the talk show arena in the late 1960s. Previously, morning talk shows consisted of a combination of news stories, discussion and interviews, but his show, Donahue, was the first of its kind to involve audience interaction. More importantly, Donahue was the first to showcase controversial or unique real life stories. In the early seventies, topics on his show included homosexuality, which had never been addressed on national television before, adultery and other things that were considered too graphic and sexually explicit to be exhibited on television. As a result of this groundbreaking style of talk programming, Donahue often had trouble with censorship and was the only television show at the time that was frequently boycotted by major stations. Although Phil Donahue is today seen as one of the greatest talk show hosts of all time,many of the things people are complaining about on today's talk shows were around more than 20 years ago on Donahue? . In the 1980s, Oprah Winfrey, Sally Jesse Raphael and Geraldo all came onto the daytime talk show scene, adhering closely to the format which Donahue had proven to be fail-safe. The 1980s saw a huge boom in the talk industry, but many talk shows stayed on the air only for one or two seasons, and never made it to Australia at all. .
It was in the early 1990s that trash talk shows really began to take off, with the entrance of Jerry Springer and Rikki Lake, amongst others. The target audience of these shows were younger, the 18-34-age bracket and suddenly talk shows were not just for middle-aged woman. The topics became even more exploitative and bizarre, with increased audience interaction, yelling, whooping, screaming and swearing. These shows began to attract concern regarding their morals and attracted more and more publicity as a result.