Princess Of Talk Young And Hip, Ricki Lake Carves Out An Audience Second Only To Oprah’s

Looking at the two women, there doesn’t appear to be anything in common between Alesa Pelote and Ricki Lake.

Born and raised in Queens, N.Y., Pelote, 19 and black, attends classes at Queensborough College to prepare for the General Equivalency Diploma exam. At 26, Ricki Lake, a white designer-clad actress reared in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., has appeared in a handful of films and now has embarked on phase two of her career: changing the face of talk shows forever.

Lake’s talk show is the first to attempt to build a viewership entirely on the support of young people. Employing the youngest talk-show host on television, young guests (and twice as many of them in each show), a faster pace, more faces of color (both in the audience and on the panels) and an emphasis on relationships, the show has reached out and dragged twentysomethings like Pelote into the talk-show viewer fold.

The coiffed Lake, host of the “Ricki Lake” show, is as far away as you can get from the flannel-shirtand-sweatpants-wearing Pelote. Yet Pelote feels a bond between them.

“She’s like my sister,” says Pelote. “She’s really nice, and she knows what she’s talking about.”

It is Pelote’s fourth pilgrimage to see her idol Lake, her fourth time sitting in the raucous audience of the nationally syndicated talk show. This time she endured a brisk Manhattan day waiting in a standby line outside Modern Telecommunications Inc. Studios with nearly 100 others, hoping to luck into a ticket for the show. Pelote will return for a fifth time next month, using tickets she waited five months to receive through the mail.

MTI Studios once was the old Tiffany building. The same room that once contained the Hope Diamond now houses “Ricki Lake,” the jewel of Columbia TriStar Television Distribution. After slightly more than a year on the air, “Ricki Lake” has found its niche and its way into the hearts of people both young and minority.

Created to capture a previously untapped daytime audience among young viewers, “Ricki” has chipped away at the tried-and-true Donahues, Sally Jessys and Geraldos of the world to become the No. 2-rated talk show (after “Oprah,” of course). Lake is now seen on more than 200 stations across the country (including KAYU-Channel 28 out of Spokane at 5 p.m. weekdays). The show’s handlers call it “the fastest-growing talk show in history,” spawning at least three rival copycat shows in development for the 1995 season.

“We saw no reason why (a youthful approach) couldn’t be successful in daytime, and a lot of people didn’t agree,” said Gail Steinberg, an executive producer for “Ricki,” and a former producer of “Donahue” for 6 years. “They said these people aren’t home to watch daytime TV. They said it would never work.”

They were wrong.

Based on initial results of November sweeps, the national ratings for “Ricki” have more than doubled in the past year, from a 2.6 Nielsen rating to a 5.4. The rating is about half that of “Oprah” (9.7), but nearly a whole point higher than the No. 3 talk show, “Jenny Jones.” (Nationally, a ratings point represents about 954,000 TV households.)

When Columbia TriStar launched “Ricki” for the 1993-‘94 season, nearly 20 other talk shows cluttered the airwaves.

“If we had entered with just another talk show, what would’ve given viewers a reason to watch our show?” Steinberg said. “You can’t be a better ‘Oprah.’ She’s the best. So we decided we wouldn’t even try. We would carve a new niche for ourselves.”

Steinberg and co-executive producer Garth Ancier looked to the Fox Broadcasting Company for inspiration. One of the founding fathers of Fox, Ancier wanted to replicate its success in grabbing younger viewers.

Consequently, “Ricki” is the “Melrose Place” of talk shows. If “Melrose” is basically the “Dallas” formula aged-down for the demographically powerful twentysomething crowd, “Ricki” does the same with talk, using topics like “Dad, you dumped Mom, not me,” “I’m dating a 40-year-old man and you can’t stop me,” “I had his baby and he kicked me to the curb” and “My mother dresses like a hooker.” The shows have other similarities: Both are extremely lowbrow, notoriously scandalous, excruciatingly energetic and perversely fun.

Remember the “Morton Downey Jr.” show, where audience and host ran wild while panelists ripped one another apart both figuratively and literally? “Ricki” is like a kissing cousin to that show, although less host-driven and mostly devoid of the racially charged bile that spewed from Downey’s show.

“Ricki Lake is the female Morton Downey Jr.,” agrees Downey, who is in the midst of developing another talk show (to begin production next month in Chicago, aiming for national syndication sometime next year), “except there was more meanness in my show than in ‘Ricki.’ Her show is designed to show the niceness as well as the outrageousness. I think she’s doing it right.”

At base, “Ricki” is meant to look a lot like an effortless one-hour party. Before and during the show, audience members are so pumped up by warm-up exercises and so goaded by producers into being as boisterous as possible that what looks on the screen like an incomprehensible free-for-all seems in the studio like completely natural and normal behavior.

“Go Ricki, go Ricki,” chant the young audience members, some of them on their feet, hands waving. Dressed up in their best it’s-Saturday-night-in-New-York-City-andI’m-going-clubbing-till-dawn attire, the predominantly minority audience is instructed during the warm-up by supervising producer Stuart Krasnow “to act like a Ricki audience.” To practice, a randomly chosen woman reads a card with a faux-talk-showrevelatory statement about being impregnated by aliens, after which the audience is scolded for not reacting enough and for “sounding like a ‘Donahue’ audience.” When the woman reads the card again the audience reaction is huge, loud, almost crazed and, therefore, deemed appropriate by Krasnow.

“We need you to raise your hands,” reminds Krasnow. “This talk show is a democracy. If you have an opinion, let us know.”

So the audience oohs and aahs throughout the show, at times yelling out comments like “You go, girl!” to Ricki, or “You are a sad case!” and “You don’t make sense!” to various members of the panel. The audience sits in judgment like a pulsating lynch mob - or like Shakespeare’s groundlings, indignant, belligerent and riotous. So riotous that, during a recent show about interracial relationships, Lake was forced to shush the crowd by saying, “Excuse me, someone’s trying to talk.”

“The audience is part of the show,” says Alan Perris, senior vice president of programming for Columbia TriStar Television Distribution. “Let’s face it, we got them a lot more involved.”

Bickering ensues on the stage. A mother begins to quibble with her daughter, whom she threatens to disown if her interracial dating continues. The daughter’s boyfriend mutters nasty comments to the mother. The interaction is all part of a day’s taping for “Ricki.” This group merely hurled insults at one another; on many occasions guests also have thrown punches.

“You will never see an outright fight on the show,” Ancier says. “You will see the beginning of it and then we’ll pull away. We always tell the guests that verbal conflict is fine, but physical conflict is not acceptable.”

Producers say that edgy quality is a result of the tension built into the show’s format. Steinberg says they wanted to throw out the staid talk show tradition of: guest sits down, guest is introduced, guest talks to camera and host about problem, commercial break, next guest sits down, and so on and so on. Lake’s producers wanted the interaction to include the host, the audience and all the guests. Each segment requires all sides of the story including “the good guy and the bad guy,” Ancier says. But problems can and have occurred when the good guy and bad guy clash, producers admitted.

“We never, ever, ever bring people on the show without their knowing what’s going to happen,” Steinberg says. “They always know who is going to be there. If we think there is going to be a problem, we won’t seat them next to each other. No, actually, if we think there’s going to be a problem, we won’t put them on.”

Conflicts, universal topics and what seems to be a conscious effort to pull in a largely nonwhite studio audience has allowed the show to cross racial boundaries.

“Ricki deals with everyday topics, real-life stuff we can all understand,” said Trevor Belgrave, 33, of Brooklyn, one of the older members of the studio audience. “There are more black people here than even on ‘Montel”’ Williams’ show - “younger black people, too.”

According to Perris, the show is meant to be entertainment, not journalism. Producers have no highfalutin motives, no pretense about educating or informing. “Geraldo does things that are pretty much on the edge a lot, but he calls himself a journalist. We have an actress and it’s fun,” said Perris.

“Ricki is pretty cheesy, but she’s not as serious as Oprah and she attacks subjects most other shows don’t touch,” McLaughlin said. “It’s unconventional. That’s why I like it.”It is the impression of fans that a quick thinking Lake runs the show, comes up with the topics and asks the questions they would want to ask had they their own shows - all while maintaining that perky little smile. In truth, the perky smile is about all Lake is in charge of.

While a team of 140 young staffers arrive bright and early each day to brainstorm about topics, book guests and plot graphics and camera angles for the show, Lake comes in at 11:30 a.m. three days a week for a briefing about the shows being taped that day, takes care of odds and ends like a recent photo shoot for USA Today, and then spends considerable time in hair and makeup. During the show, Lake reads expertly from the TelePrompter, as producers kick up a cloud of stinky permanent-marker dust, furiously jotting down follow-up questions for Lake to ask guests on white cue cards and waving them to her from off-camera.

And through it all, Lake has no comment. There was a frenetic period when she was in your face more often than a Ronco infomercial - on the cover of “People,” on “The Late Show” with David Letterman and behind bars for storming Karl Lagerfeld’s office in the name of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Now, producers of her show have decided to place a moratorium on Lake interviews. Immediately after the fur flap, during which her critics loudly doubted her new critter-loving persona and charged her with engineering a publicity scam, Lake has become inaccessible to all media “for an indefinite time,” according to a “Ricki” spokesperson.

The younger audience brings in not only killer demographics, which Perris says “is all anybody cares about,” but also a few problems, for which the show’s producers have had to make special provisions. Imposters and potential violence are daily considerations.

“Because younger viewers imply a different ethical level, we have had to be extremely tough on the veracity of the stories,” said executive producer Ancier.

It’s known in some media circles as “The Ricki Fake Show,” but Ancier says producers catch most of the phonies before they ever make it on-air. Nonetheless, during the course of the year, “Ricki” has been burned by at least 10 people “using us for their 15 minutes of fame.” To ward against such incidents, Ancier employs a full-time fact checker to investigate the credentials of potential guests and the validity of their purported stories. Guests who make it through that process then are watched closely when they arrive and throughout the show to make sure their body language and actions jibe with their tales.

Watching three giggly guests on a recent show as they sat on the panel, Ancier and others began to suspect them of concocting a story to get on the show. He had them pulled off the stage after their segment and taken to the greenroom, where a production assistant eavesdropped on their conversation to see whether they would give themselves away. An extra segment was filmed to insert in the place of the suspicious guests in case they were discovered to be phonies. (Eventually, producers decided the trio were on the level and left them in.)

Other times, producers will choose to leave a guest’s microphone on or train one of the show’s five hidden cameras on a guest throughout the show to check for peculiar behavior. Once a guest is busted, producers demand reimbursement for expenses and sometimes threaten legal action.

“These sound like extreme measures, but we have had our share of people doing this to us,” Ancier said. “People think we take this lightly, but we don’t.”

Another thing not taken lightly is security. In the past, a few guests of “Ricki” thought it appropriate to tote a weapon or two into the studio. Because of the degree of conflict and tension on-camera, “some guests see it as an opportunity to do something to another guest on national television,” Ancier said. The show went from employing “four security guards who were not adept” at detecting potential security problems to seven former cops who do everything from searching bags and sending audience members through metal detectors to sitting incognito in the audience.

Lake plays ringmaster to this never-ending circus. All other format changes aside, Steinberg says that without her the show never would have taken off. After searching for months in early 1993 for the right host, Steinberg and Ancier finally settled on Lake because she seemed “funny,” “cute,” “very smart” and “endearing,” with the life experiences of having lived on her own since the age of 18, starring in movies like John Waters’ “Hairspray” and “Cry Baby” and television’s “China Beach” and growing up overweight.

“She seems like everybody’s sister,” says Perris, echoing Alesa Pelote’s sentiments. “She seems like someone you want to go out to dinner with.”

“There’s no question Ricki has genuine TV star appeal,” Ancier said. “I mean she’s more charismatic on TV than she even is in a room. There’s something about her that people love.”

It’s that certain something about Lake that others hope to clone in Ricki-esque shows slated to appear next fall. Talk shows featuring Melissa Rivers, daughter of Joan; Carnie Wilson, the heftier of the Wilson sisters from the airy pop group Wilson Phillips; and Tempestt Bledsoe, a.k.a. Vanessa Huxtable of the “Cosby Show,” will try to out-Ricki “Ricki,” using the faster pace, more crowded roster of guests, glitzier graphics and everything else “Ricki” made famous. Ancier sees it as overkill.

“We’ve done well, so everyone and their brother is trying to duplicate it,” he says. “There’s probably room for one more in this niche, but that’s it.”

Perris thinks there’s plenty of room and that “Ricki” will beat all comers. He points out that the “Gordon Elliot” show, featuring a freakishly tall Australian host, has already incorporated some “Ricki” elements - firstperson topics and on-camera guest entrances and exits - but that “Ricki” remains unharmed.

“Oprah will always win, we’ll come in second and we’ll still be fine,” Perris said. “I don’t think any of us are thinking of knocking (Oprah) off. We just want to be in the race. There’s room for everybody.”