NEW YORK, NY.- 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 Sunday at his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. 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 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. 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 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.

And there was sex, lots of it — more and more as the years passed. Not every conversation qualified as lofty discourse, not with Donahue donning a dress and stockings to study cross-dressing, or interviewing lesbian go-go dancers, or exploring the merits of dressing up like a baby for sexual pleasure.

He offered no apologies for his frequent traipses down the low road. “This is a medium that rewards popularity, and I don’t want to be a dead hero,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “Besides, it doesn’t do any good to talk if nobody’s listening.”

People indeed listened for a long time, through more than 6,000 episodes that won a total of 20 Daytime Emmy Awards. (He himself won a lifetime achievement Emmy in 1996.) At its peak in the late 1970s and early ’80s, “Donahue” — the title shortened to a single word in the mid-1970s — was syndicated to more than 200 stations around the country, with an average viewership of 8 million. People waited 18 months for studio tickets. For a while, Donahue also had a regular interview segment on NBC’s “Today” show.

Graced with pleasing looks, his eyes a vivid blue and his thick hair a slate gray turning to white, Donahue posed questions that were deliberately provocative, sometimes to the point of shameless. “I would be afraid I’m going to die if someone told me I had leukemia,” he asked a dying child. “Aren’t you?”

His appeal to women was unmistakable. He treated them like the adults they were, and on many days they made up 90% of his studio audience. “The average housewife is bright and inquisitive,” he said in 1979, but television had treated her for too long “like some mental midget.”

Donahue was an ardent feminist as far back as the late 1960s. Critics detected a healthy measure of self-satisfaction about him. But admirers tended to agree with Nora Ephron’s assessment in her 1983 novel, “Heartburn.” “If Sigmund Freud had watched Phil Donahue,” she wrote, “he would never have wondered what women want.”

By the mid-1990s, Donahue had fallen victim to a fatal disease for any television star: low ratings. Once unassailable, he tumbled to 13th place in the Nielsen ratings for daytime talk shows. As early as the mid-’80s he had been overtaken by the unstoppable force known as Oprah Winfrey. But others came along, too. Hosts such as Jerry Springer, Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael catered to brows far lower than even those Donahue increasingly sought as his audience. “My illegitimate children,” Donahue called those interviewers. Struggling to keep up, he called it quits in 1996.

Phillip John Donahue was born in Cleveland on Dec. 21, 1935, to Phillip and Catherine (McClory) Donahue. His father was a furniture salesman, his mother a shoe clerk at a department store.

The family was steeped in Roman Catholicism, and religion loomed large for him, ultimately becoming a negative influence. He left the church, dismissing it as “sexist,” “racist” and “unnecessarily destructive,” feelings that imbued many of his shows.

He attended St. Edward High, an all-boys preparatory school in Lakewood, Ohio, and graduated in 1957 from the University of Notre Dame, where he met his first wife, Margaret Mary Cooney. They wed in 1958, when both were in their early 20s, and had four boys and a girl. But the marriage fell apart and they divorced in 1975; Donahue said that his workaholic tendencies were partly to blame.

In 1977, he interviewed Marlo Thomas, star of the sitcom “That Girl” and author of “Free to Be … You and Me,” a book with a feminist perspective that gave rise to a series of recordings and television specials for children. The two hit it off right away, and they married in 1980.

Donahue is survived by Thomas; four of his children, Michael, Kevin, Daniel and Mary Rose Donahue, from his first marriage; his sister, Kathy Taube; and two grandchildren. A son, James, died of an aortic aneurysm at age 51 in 2014.

Broadcasting lured Donahue while he was in college. For a decade, he held a succession of television jobs: news reader, street reporter and “dollar-an-hour schlepper,” as he put it, at local stations in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. Advancement did not come rapidly. Frustrated, he on occasion looked elsewhere for work, at one point sorting checks at a bank.

Early on, he had a radio show in Dayton, but television ever beckoned. He finally got the big break he needed when the Dayton station gave him his morning program. The interactions with audiences that would define him came about, in a sense, through a stroke of luck: In his first two weeks on the air, ticket holders went to his studio thinking they were going to see a variety program, not realizing it had been canceled.

Among his thousands of guests, Donahue often cited Ralph Nader as his favorite; he campaigned for Nader when he ran for president in 2000. Less successful was Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential election. Clinton grew annoyed with nonstop questions about sexual flings and marijuana use, and he angrily demanded that Donahue stick to “real issues.” The audience applauded him and booed Donahue.

In 1983, a federal jury in Denver awarded $5.9 million in damages to a woman who had sued Donahue’s production company, Multimedia Program Productions of Cincinnati. Her son had been abducted by his father in a custody fight. After the father went on “Today” with Donahue to defend his actions, the mother argued that the show’s staff had an obligation to tell her where the boy was being kept.

Another controversy resulted from a 1989 “Donahue” segment in which a woman said her daughter had been raped and impregnated by the girl’s stepfather when she was 11. Now, as an adult, the daughter sued Donahue, accusing him of causing her great trauma. But the courts tossed out her lawsuit on the grounds that the mother’s revelations were protected under the First Amendment.

In 2002, Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an anti-war documentary, “Body of War.”) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.

Throughout, Donahue stuck to his faith in hot topics. “Television’s problem is not controversy,” he said more than once. “It is blandness.” He suggested this for his epitaph: “Here lies Phil. Occasionally he went too far.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.