General
Woody Fraser, Pioneering Producer of Daytime Talk Shows, Dies at 90
He spiced up the format in creating “The Mike Douglas Show” and brought “Good Morning America” to life. But his career ended under a cloud of sexual harassment claims.
Woody Fraser, an Emmy Award-winning television producer who helped invent the daytime talk show format with programs like “The Mike Douglas Show” in the 1960s and “Good Morning America” in the 1970s, died on Dec. 21 in Ojai, Calif. He was 90.
His death, in the home of his daughter Madeline Fraser, with whom he had been living, was from heart failure, Ms. Fraser said.
Mr. Fraser’s career began in the late 1950s, not long after the dawn of network television itself. As a young director with the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company, he was tasked in 1960 with developing programs to fill the endless hours between the morning news and evening sitcoms.
His answer, “The Mike Douglas Show,” became a model for daytime television for the decades to come.
Talk shows were already a popular format, but they consisted mostly of dry interviews. Mr. Fraser saw a way to spice them up — “the mix,” he called it, blending casual conversation, surprise guests, skits and music.
“The most important ingredient for a daily show was to keep it fresh,” he told the journalist Gabriel Sherman for his book “The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News — and Divided a Country” (2014). “It’s when people get bored that they change the channel.”
Mr. Fraser knew he needed a colorful but reliable host to bring it all together. He landed on Mike Douglas, a former big-band singer who was selling real estate in Southern California.