Ricki Lake was only 24 when she launched her hugely successful talk show in the 90s. Nearly two decades later, the Hairspray star is unveiling a new chat show starting Monday.
“It’s a little bit more mature,” she tells Celebuzz. “It’s sort of a new and improved and updated Ricki Lake Show 10 years later. This time around I want to do something a little more elevated because I’m in a different place. There’s still the fun and spontaneity of my old show, it’s just a little bit more mature.”
What will Lake be gabbing about this time around?
While the old Ricki Lake Show featured an insanely catchy chant, “Go Ricki! Go Ricki!” and Baby Daddy DNA testing, the new version just taped an episode about hormone replacement therapy.
“We’ll talk about anything and everything a woman thinks about, talks about and relates to,” Lake, 43, says. “I feel very strongly that women want content, they want more than fluff.”
Also this time around, Lake has been intimately involved with creating and producing the show, a vast difference from the first time around where she was so “wide-eyed and green.” Unfortunately, all of that means less time spent with hubby Christian Evans who she married in an intimate ceremony in Paris last April.
“The honeymoon is definitely over,” she lamented, “which is sad because all I want to do is be on a beach with him, but this is what I signed up for and this is short lived. Launching the show is the hardest part.”
And there will definitely not be kids added to the picture. (Lake has two sons, Milo, 15 and Owen, 11 with ex-husband Rob Sussman).
“We took care of that, however you want to spell that out,” she confesses. “There are no more babies in the cards for us, but that’s by choice. We really thought long and hard about it, but ultimately we decided that we wanted to nurture and nourish each other’s inner child.”
And Lake is working hard on keeping the weight off with regular spinning classes although she admits that her bod isn’t as tight and lean as it was when she competed on the 13th season of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars, making it all the way to the finals.
Posters for Lake’s new show are plastered all over Los Angeles, which is causing a fair amount of embarrassment to Lake’s two boys.
“I think 70 percent of the time they’re totally embarrassed, but there’s a silent 30 percent that thinks I’m kinda cool but they’d never let me know that!”
The Rick Lake Show premieres Monday. Check your local listings.
