Bonnie Hunt gets a shot at hosting own talk show

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Bonnie Hunt has always been a fantastic talk-show guest. How will she do as a talk-show host?

We'll find out this afternoon when "The Bonnie Hunt Show" premieres (2 p.m., Ch. 14).

Hunt has finally given in and agreed to take a seat behind a desk and do a show five days a week.

"I didn't have to do this. (Executive producer) Jim (Paratore)'s been coming to me for about 15 years, actually, with this idea," Hunt told TV critics. "And it's something I've always really wanted to do, but the storyteller in me and the writer in me really wanted to do the other things."

She's starred in three sitcoms, a slew of movies and loads of voices for animated movies. She's a writer and director as well as a comedic actress.

"I've been so fortunate in my career and my own life just to have all these opportunities," Hunt said. "And the talk show has always been one of my favorite formats."

As a matter of fact, her most recent sitcom — the 2002-04 "Life with Bonnie" — cast her as a wife, mother and talk-show host. And the talk-show part of the program, which was largely improvised, was by far the best part of the show.

Hunt and her longtime writing partner, Don Lake, "put the talk-show format in there because it was really something I want to do, but I wanted to try it first to see how it felt. ... Don and I found ourselves, as writers, gravitating more and more to the talk show aspect of the show because it's where we felt more comfortable because of our improvisational backgrounds.

"We met and started at the Second City in Chicago, and we've been trying to get back to that job ever since."

Hunt has at least one thing in common with her pal David Letterman — like him, she's hilarious when she interacts with regular people. She'll have plenty of regular folks on the show. People like her own mother, who's hilarious in commercials she shot with Hunt to promote the show.

"We will have regular people and then the alien life form of celebrities," said Hunt, who welcomes Robin Williams as her first guest.

The show won't be live, but it will be as live as possible. She won't tape a bunch of shows in one day and spread them out over a week; she'll shoot one show a day, five days a week.

"I will do it as if it were a live television show, which is the way I shot a lot of my sitcoms as well," Hunt said. "We didn't spend a lot of time in editing. I think it gives a certain energy if we're going real time for the show."