Former talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael was recently approached by Vulture’s Josef Adalian to discuss her friendship with late talk show host Morton Downey Jr., who’s the subject of a documentary premiering on CNN this week. The juiciest bits, however, are about Raphael’s own career in the industry.
Raphael says the producers of Sally “betrayed” her by telling the studio they would force her to transition the show into a more Springer-like tabloid format. Because the folks at NBCUniversal were expecting something she was unwilling to provide, they canceled her show in 2002 after nearly 20 years on the air.
We weren’t doing what I call bad television. It’s easy to do bad television, screaming and yelling. We were doing a lot of health, and we were doing politics. We were doing unruly children. We were doing a lot of makeovers. I probably would’ve gone on trying desperately to change it back to what I thought would work, which is pretty much what Oprah was doing, but NBCUniversal didn’t want to hear it.
Though Sally occasionally drifted into a more tabloid-y arena, Raphael says those particular episodes—ones about paternity tests, specifically—always made her feel “unclean.” They haven’t, however, made her less proud of her track record as a reporter.