In the past, when a male politician went on the show, he would often make a joke about being there because his wife watched. (When Obama made his appearance in 2010, he said he did so because he wanted to go on a show that “Michelle actually watched.”) Their comments may have been textbook benevolent sexism, but they were also noting an important factor: 72 percent of its audience is female. (Michelle Obama was, in fact, a huge fan.) It’s a women’s show that, since its debut, women have been invested in, with hosts viewers identify with. When Tim Ryan described the people he was trying to reach as the “Meghan McCains of the world,” he seemed to be picking up on that very element of the show.

In late April, former Vice President Joe Biden visited “The View” for his first interview since announcing that he was running for president the previous day. It was his seventh appearance on the show, but his performance suggested that he still underestimated the panelists — and demonstrated the uncanny ability of “The View” to reveal truths about its guests. He had two issues — his treatment of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearing for Justice Clarence Thomas and the claims of inappropriate touching of women — that he had to address with women. Yet when asked about Hill, he seemed unprepared to adequately respond to the concerns. “I’m sorry she was treated the way she was treated,” he said. “I wish we could have figured out a better way to get this thing done.” Behar gave him the opening for a do-over: “I think what she wants you to say is, ‘I’m sorry for the way I treated you,’ not ‘for the way you were treated.’ ” But with Behar all but feeding him the answer many viewers would have found satisfying, Biden still resisted. “Well, but I’m sorry for the way she got treated,” he said. “I don’t think I treated her badly.”

“The View” premiered in 1997, the brainchild of Barbara Walters and her producing partner, Bill Geddie. “I’ve always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views,” Walters explained in the opening credits. “This is that show.” While talking to her daughter, Jackie, Walters was struck by how differently they saw the world. “The View” would be a place where women could hash out those differences, which Walters believed were generational. In the debut episode, panelists discussed whether the name John Kennedy made them think of the president or his son.

The cast was a group of relative unknowns, assembled to type. The recent N.Y.U. graduate Debbie Matenopoulos represented Gen X; Meredith Vieira, the show’s moderator, was the working mother in her 40s. And while it was practically unheard-of for someone with Walters’s journalistic gravitas to lower herself to daytime TV, Walters didn’t want the result to be pedantic. The show’s shabby-chic set could have been the living room of a seventh Friend, and guests included experts peddling advice on “the three things you need to know to get a man’s attention” in front of a live audience. But the fact that the show featured any substantive discourse at all was enough to make it revolutionary. A review in The New York Times observed that the show “dares to assume that women, even those watching at home in the morning, have minds of their own.”

The show changed when the comedian Rosie O’Donnell replaced Vieira as moderator in 2006. On O’Donnell’s watch, the set was replaced with a sleek frosted-glass table and stools — more solicitous of serious debate — and the scope of the show’s topics broadened. That season, the war in Iraq was the basis for frequent head-butting, none more memorable than a fight between O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck — a 29-year-old devout Christian and conservative and the wife of the NFL quarterback Tim Hasselbeck, who joined the show in 2003.