“The Ricki Lake Show” has been canceled. The talk show is a casualty of the crowded conditions among television talk fests. Everyone seems to want to host one. Episodes of “The Ricki Lake Show” will continue, reports the Los Angeles Times on Monday, Feb. 4, through September, but the contract for the ongoing year has not been renewed.
That many months will give host Ricki Lake – who has already done a recent “Dancing with the Stars” stint – time to pull her career together. “We would like to thank Ricki Lake as well as Executive Producer Gail Steinberg and the entire staff for their work this season,” a vice president in charge of programming said. “While we are proud of the topics the program tackled, including childhood obesity, life after the military, divorce, and addiction, we were simply not able to break through the crowded talk show marketplace.” It isn’t the topics, it seems to be the chemistry.
It appears that everyone would like to be the new Oprah Winfrey, and that just is not going to happen. The advent of Anderson Cooper and Katie Couric have somewhat closed the field to newcomers.
This was not Ricki Lake’s first effort. Her talk show in the 90s often out-drew Oprah, but these are more challenging times. "I am so proud of the shows we completed this season, sparking important conversations about everything from raising children to mental illness to suicide prevention to coming out,” Lake said. Likely fans will hear from her again.
Comments