Word: rayed
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...with Barney, the Wiggles and Elmo, all that cheerfulness attracts major loathing from some adults. Anti-Ray blogs are shockingly virulent, harping on her cutesy catchphrases, her self-congratulatory comments on her food and the fact that her recipes often involve little more than removing things from their plastic wrappers and putting them on plates. On the new show, she makes a lasagna out of ravioli because that way you don't have to bother with pasta and cheese separately...
...cheerfulness--plus the 30-minute meals she created back when her job was doing demos for a supermarket--that she has based an empire on. So far, it includes more than half a dozen best-selling books, the Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine, four Food Network shows, a line of cookware and an olive oil. "She reminds me of Julia Child," says Wolfgang Puck, the celebrated Los Angeles chef whose back Ray is rubbing even though they just met an hour ago. "She has a completely different personality, but the message is the same. The message...
Other than sunniness, Ray's main attribute is accessibility. She positions herself at all times as the Everywoman with the hick upstate--New York twang. Like a sorority girl cooking for a charity event, she calls her dishes "yum-o" and says things like "Good thinkin', Lincoln." On her first few shows, she plays up the fact that--oh, ditsy Rachael--she has a limp at the moment because she fell down the stairs in her house. At a segment at Sterling Vineyards in Napa Valley, Calif., in which she and Puck choose wine for the Oscars' Governors Ball...
...attract her kind of following by just being accessible, though. Ray, like Regis Philbin, is gifted at being on television. It's almost as if she has too much energy to interact with directly and has to be filtered by a screen. "She kind of explodes through the television in a way that few people do," says Brooke Johnson, president of the Food Network, which started airing...
...build on that accessibility, the talk show focuses on interviews with everyday people, not celebrities. Fans send in clips of themselves demonstrating how to shove tea lights into an eggplant or how to wash jeans to avoid flat-butt syndrome. Ray even tells jokes, the kind that start with "What do you call ..."--a type that might otherwise have left the air when Hee Haw was canceled. After a viewer competed against Ray to see who could carry more grocery items around her kitchen, Ray bear-hugged her and yelled, "We're buddies! We're buddies! We're hugging...