Sally Jessy Raphael
The oversized red glasses, the studio audience on its feet, and topics like "My Husband Wears Dresses": Sally was the daytime confessional you watched home sick from school, years before Springer turned the genre into a brawl. Nineteen seasons, 3,820 episodes, and one very famous pair of frames.
Sally Lowenthal was born in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1935 and spent part of her childhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her break came on radio: from 1981 she hosted a call-in advice show on NBC's Talknet that grew to more than 200 stations, and one of its listeners was Phil Donahue, whose encouragement led to a television tryout with producer Burt Dubrow. The talk show that resulted, first titled In Touch with Sally Jessy Raphael, went on the air in St. Louis on October 17, 1983, and into national syndication soon after, a half-hour program that expanded to an hour in 1986.
The glasses were an accident. Before an early newscast she could not read the teleprompter, ran to a store across the street with five minutes to air, and the only pair she could afford was oversized and red. Station managers hated them, the audience liked them, and she kept wearing that style for the rest of her career. In her own later telling, the shop tried to sell her something pricier, and the only glasses at her price were red, so red it was.
The show hit its stride once it moved to Manhattan in 1989. Raphael won the Daytime Emmy for talk-show host in 1989 and the show itself won in 1990, she turned up as herself in The Addams Family in 1991, and the 3,500th episode aired in early 1998. The format was the 90s tabloid talk show in full: audience members putting their own questions to the guests, drag queens dressed as Sally, out-of-control teens, hypnotists, and titles like "Women Who Have to Kill Their Husbands." Raphael had little say in the topics. As Dubrow put it, we produce the show, she hosts the show; she called herself the moderate of the genre, the married mother among the shouters.
By 2000 her ratings were the lowest they had been in twelve years, and she felt her syndicator cared more about promoting Jerry Springer and Maury Povich than about her. The cancellation was announced in March 2002 and the final episode aired that May, closing with a montage of Raphael destroying the red glasses: dropping a bowling pin on them, running them over with a car and a train, and finally throwing them off a bridge tied to bricks.
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