Learning to love Rosie O'Donnell

LOS ANGELES - Rosie O'Donnell has spent much of the past two decades on my enemies list. Maybe it was her curt dismissal of my questions at a comedy festival, back when everyone else was convinced she was the Queen of Nice. Maybe it was the way she bullied her fellow panelists on "The View" and made the show even more unbearable. And don't even get me started on the unintentional pain she delivered playing a dominatrix in the box-office flop "Exit to Eden."

But, Rosie, I'm ready to forgive and forget. The country needs you. More important, Oprah needs you.

"The Rosie Show," a weekday evening talk show debuting Monday, airs on Winfrey's OWN Network, a cable outlet that's fallen well short of expectations, averaging about 110,000 viewers -- a third of what advertisers were promised.

O'Donnell seems looser, more mature and, yes, funnier than she ever has -- an adult coming in to help salvage a mess of reality programming and shows that rely almost solely on Oprah's holier-than-thou image.

At a press conference this summer, O'Donnell, 49, had critics guffawing as she compared her agent to a scorpion; shared how she went to a spa's relaxation area and promptly had a panic attack, and revealed that her publicist had warned her to stay away from questions including the words "Barbara Walters" or "Donald Trump."

She also poked fun at herself, a decidedly new skill she's picked up since her bitter breakup with "The View" in 2007.

"If I'm at a table with famous people eating dinner, people will come over to me as if I'm the E-Z Pass lane," she said. "They'll go, 'You're eating with Martin Short and Madonna!' I'm like, 'I know. Now get the hell away before they yell at you.' I really am more the audience than I ever was. Nobody is at home going, 'God, if I can only be Rosie O'Donnell, an overweight lesbian who yells too much.'"

"When I was 33, I think the appeal of my program was this authentic, genuine appreciation of pop culture," said O'Donnell, who will do the new show from Winfrey's studios in Chicago. "I loved people like [Barbra] Streisand and Tom Cruise, and the concept that I could meet them was really beyond my belief. And now, both those people have stayed in my house, right? So the enthusiasm that I had for celebrities has changed. I have evolved and grown and the show is going to be reflective of that."

There's another reason we might be seeing a different side of O'Donnell: She didn't think she'd be here this long. Her mother died of breast cancer at 39 and O'Donnell expected she'd meet a similar early fate.

"Then I finally realized, crap, I may live," she said. "It's like when you play a video game with the quarters and you do really well and get extended play. And finally I thought, maybe I should do something."

That's reason enough to start rooting for Rosie. Unless she does "Exit to Eden II."