Lake, Ricki (1968—)

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Lake, Ricki (1968—)

Billed as an "Oprah Winfrey for Generation X," Ricki Lake has a career and well-publicized personal life that have run parallel to those of rival Winfrey. However, whereas Winfrey has acted in movie adaptations of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker novels, Lake has appeared most memorably in John Waters's "gross-outs," and while Winfrey's talk show is perceived as up-market, Lake's is arguably more lightweight, possibly even trashy. Nonetheless, much like Winfrey, Ricki Lake's story remains the very stuff of American popular mythology—a narrative that could easily be the subject of one of her talk shows. Her well-documented battle against obesity, her struggle to escape an abusive relationship, and her fluctuating professional fortunes all lend her credibility as a television "agony aunt," as her personal history brings her closer to both her audience and her guests.

Trained at stage school, Lake's big break came at the age of 19, when she was cast as the lead in cult director John Waters' 1988 movie Hairspray, a campy take on pre-Beatles American youth culture in which Lake played a bouffanted, overweight teenager who improbably wins both a televised dance competition and the heart of the local heartthrob. Subsequently, Lake appeared in other Waters movies and demonstrated her range in an adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.'s grim expose of urban living Last Exit to Brooklyn (1990). She also found small-screen fame as nurse Holly Pelagrino in the Vietnam war drama China Beach (1988-91).

Her eponymous talk show debuted in 1993 and rapidly became a ratings success, pushing The Oprah Winfrey Show hard for the coveted top spot. In a seemingly ever-expanding generic field, the show aimed to capture a more youthful audience by tackling topics deemed attractive to this demographic. Boston-based journalist Traci Grant christened it "the Melrose Place of talk shows." Under the banner of "Talk for Today's Generation," individual show titles in the 1997 season clearly reflected this unashamedly youthful bias—"Ricki's Dating Bootcamp," "Hidden Secret Pregnancies," "Controlling Parents," "Teen Alcoholism," "School Bullies," and "Growing Up Gay." As Lake herself has observed, "This show is geared towards a totally different audience, which could not relate to talk shows before we came along. So in that sense I guess we are a voice for younger people."

In the 1998 season Lake revamped the show to include music, more celebrity appearances, and games. Although the show continued with discussion at its core, it also introduced features such as "Fun Fridays," in which the host took a look at news and gossip from the world of TV, movies, and music. Such alterations indicated that the formula needs constant refreshing to appeal to a notoriously volatile niche market.

With show titles that typically read, as Andy Pietrasik has noted, like "the diary of a nation immersed in self-help lessons," some commentators have argued that talk shows provide a healthful arena for the airing of previously taboo topics. Ricki Lake has noted that "people do sometimes talk about intimate things which I wouldn't necessarily talk about for the first time on TV, but it's better to get this stuff out than slip it under the rug." Gail Sternberg, executive producer of Ricki Lake, has claimed that "talk shows are the community of the Nineties," providing a cathartic outlet for millions of ordinary Americans who cannot afford either expensive therapy or access to professional advice. To their supporters, talk shows are the televisual equivalent of the town meeting, enabling ordinary members of the great American public to exercise their constitutional right to free speech and to establish their own agenda (within the parameters demarcated by the show's makers and backers, of course).

However, while all of the above might be true of earlier talk show incarnations—like Donahue (nationally syndicated from 1977) or even The Oprah Winfrey Show (nation-wide from 1986), which tackled issues such as atheism, racism, and political corruption—talk shows of the 1990s have sparked controversy for their perceived abandonment of any semblance of constructive debate. As Jane Shattuc has pointed out, in this respect Ricki Lake is typical of talk shows that shifted from a public dimension to "interpersonal con-flicts that emphasized the visceral nature of confrontation, emotion and sexual titillation." Here then, Lake's own showbiz background might be taken as symbolic of this movement away from any "serious" journalistic intentions the genre might have previously harbored. Former Secretary of Education William Bennett famously singled out the Ricki Lake show as "cheap, demeaning and immoral," likening it to "the moral equivalent of watching a train wreck."

The American Psychotherapy Association called for its members to boycott guesting as "experts" on talk shows, ostensibly because they indulged in potentially harmful pop psychology and meaningless psycho-babble. Talk of the "healing process" and calls to "forgive and get on with your life," it argued, simply encouraged a victim culture in which people take no responsibility for their own actions. Detractors claim that talk shows offer studio and TV audiences the dubious and vicarious pleasure of watching others being ritually humiliated, conducting trial-by-television in which hosts like Lake draw more out of their guest/victims in order to whip audiences into a frenzy. For many critics, Ricki Lake is responsible for dragging the whole genre down-market, spearheading a new wave of talk shows, such as The Jerry Springer Show, which, in their relentless drive for ratings success, have unearthed increasingly outrageous guest/vic-tims and sensationalistic topics.

Combating charges of titillation, Lake is reported to have said, "There's a line we don't cross. We won't put someone on a stage to laugh at them, belittle them, make fun of them, and basically destroy their life." Yet while this sensitivity is sometimes difficult to discern, the show's ironic, camp aesthetic is more visible. Perhaps, then, we are not supposed to take it too seriously. After all, Lake's show is less reverential, more self-consciously driven by the primary desire to entertain rather than to educate, and so ultimately closer to the movies of John Waters than many—including perhaps Lake herself—have been prepared to admit.

—Simon Philo