PASADENA, Calif. — Six years after he left television, the legendary Phil Donahue is back. He begins hosting his own weekday cable news/talk show Monday at 6 p.m. (repeated at 9 p.m.) on MSNBC.
And his return from retirement hasn't exactly caused a problem at home.
"Marlo Thomas . . . is thrilled that her husband's going back to work," he said. "Well, she saw me yelling at the TV set."
The events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath got Donahue's blood racing and made him want to be back on TV instead of just yelling at it. Which is something he never imagined back in 1992.
"It is certainly true; after 29 years and 6,000 hours on television, a little voice said, 'All right, they've heard you already. Sit down,' " he said.
The one-time king of daytime TV isn't simply reviving his show, however. He's working in cable instead of syndication. He's working in the evening hours instead of daytime.
"The nighttime is a significantly different arena than daytime — certainly different from the daytime I left in 1996," he said. "For all the screaming heads that we see in this arena, these folks are discussing very serious issues. And that excites me to have this opportunity.
"We have the opportunity now to make decisions that might just influence, or at least reflect, what we believe is a large segment of the American population who don't have someone speaking for them on television."
He won't be working in front of a studio audience; he'll be doing one-on-one interviews in an MSNBC studio. He will, however, take questions from callers once again.
Donahue said he has "a responsibility to be fair" in his coverage, but he's not trying to hide his own political leanings. Unlike some of his counterparts, he's not afraid to wear the liberal label — after all, he helped run Ralph Nader's 2000 presidential campaign.
"Nobody has asked me to be somebody I'm not or try to deceive people regarding who I am," he said. "Pretty hard to do after having been out there for Ralph Nader."
Not that he's different, but the technology certainly is. He's backed by the NBC News infrastructure, and he's taken aback by the technology at his disposal.
"My high-school prom was in a room smaller than my set at MSNBC. And for a guy whose first show began in 1967, it is not possible to overstate the difference now," Donahue said.
And he raves about the backing he's getting from MSNBC executives and staff.
"I couldn't ask for more support. I feel very good about the welcome I have received from younger people at MSNBC — high-fives all around," he said.
Of course, there's more to television than just doing a good show. There's the ever-present need to produce ratings.
And "Donahue" will be going up against both Connie Chung's new show on CNN and the current king of cable talk, the Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.
"We have a responsibility to do everything we can to win. We want to win. The name of the game is the size of the audience — that's the coin of the realm, and we want to deliver that to MSNBC."
Which is quite a task for a senior citizen working in the youth-obsessed world of TV. One newspaper columnist even called Donahue "Paleozoic."
"Well, it's true," he said. "Carbon dating allows us to know that I'm 66 years old. MTV I'm not."
But he's not sure that that's going to matter.
"I certainly have met a lot of young people over the past several months. They were in the house when their mothers were watching the 'Donahue' show. So I'm not an unfamiliar face to younger folks."
E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com