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.
“The Mike Douglas Show” debuted in 1961 as a local program in Cleveland, and within a few years it was syndicated nationwide. Mr. Douglas proved an affable, up-for-anything guide to the often zany retinue of guests and gags Mr. Fraser threw at him.
Mr. Douglas caught fly balls with Ernie Banks, “Mr. Cub,” the Hall of Fame shortstop and first baseman for the Chicago Cubs. He played tennis with Prince Rainier of Monaco and went ostrich racing with the actor Dom DeLuise.
“He was brilliant,” Mr. Douglas said of Mr. Fraser in an interview for the Television Academy. “A little bit nutty, but brilliant.”
Among Mr. Fraser’s many hires for the show was Roger Ailes, who began as a production assistant and later became a Republican political consultant and, later still, chairman and chief executive of Fox News.
In 1966, Mr. Fraser was promoted to oversee talent and development at Westinghouse, a move that he suspected had resulted from a quiet coup by Mr. Ailes, who replaced him at “The Mike Douglas Show” (Mr. Fraser returned from 1973 to 1975).
Mr. Fraser went to ABC, where he produced a slate of talk-format programs, including “The Dick Cavett Show” and “The Della Reese Show.” At one point he was responsible for some 32 hours of television a week.
In 1975, ABC executives approached him with a new challenge. NBC was dominating the morning with “The Today Show,” and ABC needed a response. They had a title, “Good Morning America,” but told Mr. Fraser the rest was up to him.
He pushed for more on-the-ground, live reporting, but also for a heavier emphasis on entertainment. Initially hosted by David Hartman and Nancy Dussault, it was a hit, and by 1980, when Mr. Fraser left the show, it was regularly beating “The Today Show” in the ratings.
Beginning in the 1970s and continuing for more than 40 years, Mr. Fraser created or helped create a long list of daytime programs for ABC, many of which became staples — among them “The Richard Simmons Show,” for which he won a Daytime Emmy in 1982, “That’s Incredible!” and “The Home Show.” He worked for other networks, too, creating for NBC “America Alive!,” a short-lived daytime talk and variety show.
His programs were usually positive and informative, at a time when daytime television was increasingly filled with talk shows focused on the outrageous and prurient.
“Recently in the TV listings ‘Oprah’ had a show about women who had shot their husbands and still loved them,” Mr. Fraser told The St. Petersburg Times in 1989. “‘Geraldo’ had satanic babies. ‘Donahue’ had cross-dressing. And we had a show about barbecuing.”
He created children’s programming for Nickelodeon, and, in 2006, he made amends with his protégé Mr. Ailes at Fox News, joining the channel to run “Huckabee,” a show hosted by the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
In 2012, for the Hallmark Channel, Mr. Fraser created “Home and Family,” a talk show focused on domestic topics like cooking and personal care. The show was yet another success, but he was removed in 2018 amid accusations that he had sexually harassed several female employees and that, while at Fox, he had sexually harassed a frequent guest.
Lawsuits were filed against him and the networks, but all were dropped or dismissed.
Forrest Lovat Fraser III was born on Nov. 16, 1934, in Cincinnati. He later moved with his family to Glenview, Ill., where his father was an executive vice president for the Pabst Blue Ribbon Company. His mother, Eleanor (Kitchen) Fraser, oversaw the home. Waggish friends called Forrest Woodsy and later Woody from an early age.
He graduated from Dartmouth in 1956 with a degree in zoology. Around that time, his father died, and Mr. Fraser was compelled to find a job back in Chicago to support his mother. He went into television, and within a year was helping to produce a string of talk-format shows, none of which succeeded.
Still, he was convinced that the daytime market, made up mostly of stay-at-home women, was a gold mine. He approached his bosses at Westinghouse with his plan for what became “The Mike Douglas Show”; if it failed, he told his family, he was going to switch to selling insurance.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. He married Noreen Friend, a fellow television producer, in 1990. After she received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2001, she developed a series of fund-raising telethons to support medical research, programs her husband helped produce. She died in 2017 at 63.
Along with his daughter Madeline, from his third marriage, he is survived by four children from his first marriage, Wendy, Stacy, Chip and Doug Fraser; a son from his second marriage, Kyle; a son from his third marriage, Mack; three grandchildren; and a stepson from his second marriage, Mason.
Though he continued to produce informative, positive shows, in time Mr. Fraser grew frustrated with the changing economics of daytime television, which was putting a premium on unscripted shock.
“The dollars have driven the budgets lower,” he said in a 2012 interview with the National Association of Television Program Executives. “You could not do a ‘Mike Douglas Show’ today. It would be way too expensive.”
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