TVSquad

On the theory that it worked for another actress who play Tracy Turnblad, Marissa Jaret Winokur is going to star in her own daytime talk show, just like Ricki Lake before her. (Can Nikki Blonsky be next?)

Marissa J, who's currently spinning, twirling and trying to look graceful on Dancing With the Stars, will be developing a syndicated yakker (industry talk for talk show) for Sony Pictures Television. The fact that another company is also doing the same thing for Marie Osmond means one thing: producers think that if you can dance, you can talk. That's a show business axiom, isn't it? Her show, if it flies, will be for fall 2009.

Sony has dipped in syndication before with the Wayne Brady Show, which failed to click but did win the star a Daytime Emmy. Marissa is already an award winner, grabbing the 2003 Tony as Best Actress in a musical for playing Tracy in the Broadway version of Hairspray opposite Harvey Fierstein.

Move over, Rachael Ray! Another Food Network bird is straying for the nest to try her wings in syndication. Southern diva Paula Deen is readying a daytime cooking show for syndication in 2009. She also following Rachael's lead by not giving up her secure and lucrative connection to Food Network. Her Paula's Home Cooking and Paula's Party programs will remain Food Network staples.

The challenge for Paula will be coming up with a show that's not simply an echo of her other two shows. Unlike Rachael, who does a full-fledged talk show with a cooking segment, Paula's new effort is being called a "cooking" show. That could be limiting.

I was looking over a "Where are they now?" feature our friends at AOL put together on the cast of Cheers, and a few of the mysteries of the long-running sitcom classic came to mind. These were head-scratchers big and small that made me wonder if the writers are the most clever geniuses ever to man a word processor (it was the '80s, after all) or, like in most sitcoms, consistency of story was the first thing to go if a good joke came up in the writers' room.

I guess I should just go over to Ken Levine's blog and ask him, since he wrote for the show for many years. But if I did that, I wouldn't get paid for it. So, after the jump are the biggest Cheers mysteries, starting with the biggest and most obvious one:

Kirstie Alley is coming back to the small screen and Oprah's got her. Harpo Productions has signed Alley for future TV projects. It could be a sitcom like Fat Actress, it could be a talk show, like the one she shopped around last year, but in whatever format, Harpo will be behind it. One definite possibility would be for Kirstie to appear in a show on OWN, the new Oprah Winfrey Network, which used to be Discovery Health Channel.

Out of the dozens and dozens of shows that go to pilot every season, we only see a handful. Some of them vanish forever and some might end up online in one way or another.

Below is a list of ten shows that didn't make the fall schedule on the networks this year. Some of them might show up midseason, but most won't. And just for a little added fun, I've included three shows that are completely made up. Can you tell which ones they are? I'll answer in the comments later tonight (and don't go looking online for the answer; that's no fun). The shows are listed after the jump. Some of them sound crazy, but hey, if you told me two years ago that those Geico cavemen commercials would be a series...

You know, Andrew, the blogosphere tends to only focus on the negative and the sensationalistic, so I thought I'd point out a celebrity doing something nice for once: Kirstie Alley --who will next be seen in the original Lifetime movie Write & Wrong playing a screenwriter who enlists her nephew to pretend he wrote her scripts when she finds out the industry considers her too old-- has been in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas providing food, clothing and pet supplies to those affected by the tornadoes and storms that hit the area recently.

The AP article points out that Alley enlisted some of her fellow Scientologists to help out, though I don't see that as significant. There could be a band of yodeling leprechaun-worshiping welders serving up waffles and pants for the people there and I wouldn't care at all as long as they're helping out. As devastating as these events can be, it does tend to bring out the best in people, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.

Well, you were warned that this was going to happen: yesterday, the newly-svelte Kirstie Alley came out on the stage of Oprah wearing a bikini. Like I mentioned yesterday, any 55-year-old woman is pretty brave to show her body like that on national television, much less one that dropped enough weight to garner an extra fee at UPS. The pictures of Kirstie that had been floating around lately showed a version of her that hadn't been that thin since she was a contestant on Match Game. But without Photoshop to help her out, what would she look like?

Actually, pretty good. First of all, she used what she called "stripper hose" to sinch her in a bit (she told Oprah she wishes she was able to find hose that went up to her neck). And, of course, Oprah's directors were generous enough to not get too close with the cameras. Oh, and she didn't show her ass, either. But what we did see was a woman who's in pretty good shape. She wasn't as rail-thin as the pictures showed, but it didn't matter; her goal wasn't to get rail-thin, it was to make her feel better about herself. I wouldn't kick her out of bed, that's for sure.

Anyway, judge for yourself; video of the appearance is after the jump.

About a year ago, Kirstie Alley went on Oprah to tell her and the audience why she had ballooned to over 220 pounds and how she managed to drop 55 pounds. Remember that at the same time she decided to become a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig and start losing the weight, she starred in a self-parodying Showtime series Fat Actress, so her chubbiness ended up being quite profitable for her.

Now she's lost a total of 75 pounds, and is so proud of her new figure, the 55-year-old Alley is going to appear on the show again this afternoon... in a bikini. Think about this: not many 55-year-olds would appear on a national TV show in a bikini to begin with, much less one that has just lost the equivalent of a 25-inch TV off their bodies. I'm sure some of the leftover flab has been nipped and tucked by talented doctors, but going out there in a bikini is pretty brave, even for a ballsy woman like Alley.

Alley talks about her weight gain and loss, and her Oprah appearance, in this Life magazine inteview. The details of what she ate to get to her maximum density is pretty scary, even to a hefty eater like myself.