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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, she made sure to loudly announce during a tasting that "it looks like the setup for one of those chicks who play glasses with their fingers." During the daily snack time on her talk show, she walks out and personally serves her audience food, and unlike many TV hosts, she makes it feel as though she's chatting instead of lecturing. She is the most accessible celebrity ever. When she goes food shopping, her fans don't praise her; they ask her which aisle items are in. While some new shows have to pay audiences or bus them in from nursing homes, Ray had a waiting list of 19,000 for her 110 seats before taping started.
You can't 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 her in 2001.
To 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! We're sharing!" We're also starting to freak me out.
But not her fans. Ray--who has no teleprompter, earpiece, cue cards or even writers--has a finely honed sense of what is and is not Rachael Ray. When the Vegas affiliate wanted a promo in which she would say, "Join me for an entertaining and unpredictable hour of television," she refused. Instead, she blurted out, "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but if you want to know what happens on my show, you'll have to check it out at 10 a.m." The audience went nuts. There are, apparently, Rachael Ray clichés and non--Rachael Ray clichés. And Ray is amazing at never breaking character in public. "In order to do a television show every day," says Winfrey, "the most important quality a host needs to have is the ability to be themselves day after day after day after day--on camera. And that's what she has."
Like Seinfeld co-creator Larry David, who declared there would be no hugging and no learning on his show, Ray drew up criteria for every segment: there could be no crying or finger wagging; it would have useful information for viewers of every age and class, and it would make the audience laugh. "I hope people feel more alive around the edges after they watch us," she says. Either that or they'll feel exhausted.