Drill deep into the vast, barren wilderness that makes up so much of American network TV programming and almost any core example will come up with unmistakable traces of Barbara Walters.
Strands of her DNA wind through at least six decades of broadcasting. She has gazed out from the other side of the cathode tube since the days of flickering black and white, and emerged in the era of three dimensional high-definition, flat screen LCD colour.
In the embedded age of YouTube and iPhones, Walters could be said to have outlived television itself. She has seen it all, survived it all. Cuba, Kennedy, the Cold War, Woodstock, women's lib, Vietnam, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Iran, Iraq and the Arab Spring.
She has outlasted nine American presidents, seven recessions and the Soviet empire. In the accelerated timeline of popular culture it is a bit like encountering an eyewitness to Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow.
And now she is ... what? Retiring? Surely, the event is more significant than that. Abdicating. That is what happens when monarchs step down, and for many, Walters was the reigning queen of US television.
She is indisputably well past pensionable age. It would be ungentlemanly to say how far past. She was born in the last year of the roaring 20s, on September 25. You do the maths.
Not that age is necessarily a barrier to TV celebrity. Famously, US audiences have always shown a fondness for leathery old beasts roaring across the evening scheduling.
But these are almost exclusively male, the Dan Rather and Walter Cronkites of TV land. No one would ever accuse Walters of being leathery, and if she wears the years as lightly as the blonde streaks in her hair, well, that is a matter for no one but her colourist and plastic surgeon.
She announced her decision this week from the set of her talk show The View, addressing the studio audience with an expression of mock horror and the words: "I have been on television continuously for over 50, 50 years! Ugh."
Walters isn't actually going for another year, but there is no turning back. In her own words: "I don't want to appear on another programme, I don't want to climb another mountain."
The mountains she has climbed are certainly high enough. One of the first was in 1961, a year after her screen debut on The Today Show as the resident weather girl. The job saw her also handed the frothier assignments.
Soon after, Walters was dispatched to spend the day as a Playboy Club bunny, learning the art of pinning on the cotton tail to a skimpy costume and serving customers without spilling the drinks or herself.
Returning to the studio, smirking co-presenter Hugh Downs confided to her and an audience of millions that "you make a very cute bunny".
Male egos dogged those early years (some might say they still do). When Downs left, his replacement, Frank McGee, who was hired on twice her salary, refused to host interviews with Walters unless he was given the first four questions. Walters had to wait until after McGee's death, in 1974, to be officially named co-host, the first woman to hold such a title on American TV.
But Walters seemed to thrive in such a chauvinistic environment. It was here that she marked out her territory; the exclusive big-name interview that became such an inescapable component of fame that by the end of her career it was no longer clear for whom this rite of passage was more important; the interviewer or interviewee.
Fidel Castro was an early catch; a three-hour marathon in Havana that was even broadcast in Cuba once all references to the freedom of the press had been removed.
During her career, she has interviewed every American president and Monica Lewinsky, the latter pulling the bigger ratings. Channelling every wife in the United States she asked the young woman at the heart of the Bill Clinton scandal: "Did you ever think about what Hillary Clinton might be feeling?"
In general, though, it would be fair to say she will be remembered more for who she interviewed rather than what she said. There were exceptions - she asked the Russian leader Vladimir Putin: "Did you ever order anyone killed" (answer "no") - but the toughness that took her to the top was less obvious in front of the camera. Latterly she was more comfortable with the likes of Michael Jackson or cosying on the sofa with Elton John and his adopted baby. She once floored Katharine Hepburn by asking her "if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"
Her interview in December 2011, with a "mild-mannered ophthalmologist" - better known as President Bashar Al Assad - now looks catastrophically misjudged, especially when it emerged that Walters had previously holidayed with Assad and his wife, whom she later described as "charming" and "thoughtful".
The metamorphosis from news to entertainment has been slow but inexorable. It is said that when the president of CBS, Richard Salant, learnt Walters had been hired by ABC for $1million (Dh3.6m) a year, he remarked: "Is Barbara a journalist or is she Cher?" In 2009, Forbes magazine estimated her net worth at $150 million (Dh550m).
All this came at a price, as Walters revealed in her autobiography Audition, published in 2008. Her childhood was overshadowed by her older sister, who was mentally handicapped, and the implosion of her father's business, which saw him lose both his chain of nightclubs and the family home on Central Park West.
She has married four times, twice to the same man, television executive Merv Adelson. She has a daughter, Jaqueline, adopted while with husband number two, the theatre owner and producer Lee Guber. In Audition she admitted an adulterous relationship with Edward Brooke, a US senator, that she claimed to have ended to avoid a scandal.
The intrusions of her private life into her public image are something she clearly finds difficult. She concealed a series of miscarriages and the adoption of her daughter in the late 1960s. Asked by The New York Times why she had failed to stay the course with her marriages, Walters replied: "I had this job, and this life and enough money. I didn't have to fight the bad days."
In 1997 she created The View, a daytime talk show that featured a panel of strong-minded women, of which, inevitably, she was one. But there have been signs recently that Walters has been feeling the strain. She recovered from open heart surgery in 2010, and had a bizarre brush with chickenpox that she claimed to have caught in a clinch with a "well known actor" last New Year's Eve.
Walters insists she is in robust health. "I'm perfectly healthy, this is my decision. I've been thinking about it for a long time and this is what I want to do," she explained to her audience this week.
It is ironic on the eve of stepping down, that her fractured personal life, estranged offspring, battles with ill health and especially her triumph over the forces of male chauvinism, make her more in tune with the zeitgeist in 2013 than at any time in her career.
Not that Walters will, as she puts it, be "walking into the sunset. There will be special occasions and I will come back".
The next 12 months will see not so much a retirement party as a procession, with a season of retrospectives and an Oscar special next February before the fall of the final curtain.
And then? Walters says that she wants "to sit in a sunny field and admire the gifted women - and OK some men too - who will be taking my place". As if they could.
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